This is pretty amazing.
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/jupiter/index.live

i saw that last night on /.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/05/12...-Missing-a-Belt
http://www.tgdaily.com/space-features/4973...elts-disappears
http://www.areavoices.com/astrobob/?blog=78068

I've heard that this is apparently at least a quasi-periodic phenomenon, but can't locate any reputable references to support that.

Regardless, yet more evidence that Jupiter is a very dynamic world.

Readers of The Planetary Society Blog were not left out. Emily says, "...apparently, this is an event that happens rather more frequently than the Saturnian equinox, once every 3 to 15 years."

Next we are going to hear that Jupiter's pants fell down. No pictures please.

No worries!
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no but this
" it's shrinking ..."
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You guys are just plain sick & wrong...

sick???

It isn't shrinking...okay Jupiter lost a few pounds and its old belt no longer fit. My understanding is that Europa is knitting Jupiter a new one. It should be done in a few months.

For a nice series of before, during, and after shots, check out the Jupiter images from the first couple of months of this year: http://alpo-j.asahikawa-med.ac.jp/Latest/J...9Apparition.htm

It looks a bit like the Pioneer 10 images of Jupiter. Although in the Pioneer images, the red spot is HUGE.

A quick comparison with the Pioneer 10 view of Jupiter:

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my understanding is that the higher light colored clouds are just covering it up , and this happens every now and then .

The very deep solar minimum we are experiencing may be a correlation to the missing band.
It may be interesting to compare the last 50 years of Jupiter banding to solar input (at Jupiter's distance) as well as the solar magnetic field out there (i.e. cosmic ray bombardment as a function of magnetic fields). Another lead may be the inputs of past Coronal Mass Ejections out to Jupiter's neighborhood). The current solar cycle is projected to last a slow-pokey 13+ years compared to the nominal 11 years. A new Dalton-like Minimum may be in the works...could Jupiter's atmosphere respond that quickly?

Cheers

Ian R I like the comparison you did. I was thinking the same thing when I first saw the images.
The great red spot looks different.

Let me add a Pioneer 11 image that I processed some time ago:




The GRS changes are apparent, but besides that the band structure around it is also quite different. Fascinating!

Well, for crying out loud, look at how much difference it was in 1879. This photo was taken in blue light, which makes bands and especially the red spot appear darker, but look at how big the red spot is and look at how bright the area is around it. Jupiter had its familiar, two big band structure before and after this.

That's really nice work -- can you explain a little more about how you did the processing?

Well, besides the normal processing techniques such as level adjustments, for the Pioneer images I redid the color composites by processed color and luminance separately.

So the processing steps would be something like this:

- Find and stack the best copies of the image to reduce noise, scan and print artifacts. Two good copies are enough to recover the original 6bit dynamic of the images.

- From the stacked master frame, I made two copies. One I change to B&W and process to bring out faint details. The other I use to create a color image as well balanced as possible. For that I mix the red and blue channels to recreate green (although this was already done on most of the original images). I may have to apply some with pass filters to get rid of color gradients.

- I recombine the luminance from the first version of the image with the color information from the second version, adjusting saturation, gamma and overall look using Cassini images as a visual reference.

- Finally, I warp the image to correct from the spin scan image distortion, using a simulated Jupiter disk with a similar view point that came from Celestia.

I think that final results are close to what the original data shows and only geometry is still somewhat off.

I found this image of Jupiter in a textbook, 'A Treatise on Astronomy" by Elias Loomis, 1893

...the passage after the 'plate' reports to us that the 'ancients' (astronomers more than 50 years ago) observed that the bands have broken up before...

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Look here for planetary images acquired between 1890 and 1977:

Database of planetary images (BDIP) : http://www.lesia.obspm.fr/BDIP/

The Red Spot should be easier to see in small telescopes now.

Looking into the historical images, Jupiter looks similar to today around 1904:

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By 1906 it had returned to it's normal appearance:

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Very dynamic planet indeed.
I didn't go through all the images, so probably there's lots of photographic evidence for the other fading cycles, and this really shows the importance of having old images accessible, even if their quality is sometimes low.

What a great site! I have long wished someone would compile something like that.

I already tried to make some RGB composites out of those old Jupiter images, but each original image is several minutes apart and the planet's rotation has shifted features too much. Some of the images are quite good for the time and techniques (chemical photography) used.

I had done some of that (and I think I posted one example) right before my computer crash in 2005. The project and scans were lost, and I never took it back up. Granted I was working with images of Mars, and images of Mars benefit from the planet's slower rotation.

Edit - Found it - Mars in 1909.

Ted,
Nice work with the 1909 Mars image! (how you got RGB is still a mystery to me...but)
These two features popped out as if the image was taken yesterday in a good sized 'scope

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(... I think I'm right ?...)

Thanks

Yes, you are right. And I did the color the old fashioned way - I stacked a red, a green, and a blue image.

Yes, nice classic Mars image. If you compare it to the current planet, there are changes and the albedo patterns. Syrtis Majoris does look somewhat different, with an extension to the left that is not visible now.

I think that Jupiter or Saturn would benefit more from that reprocessing effort, because the atmospheric features are less contrasted and have different colors. One long standing question (for me) is if the general color of Jupiter has changed or not over the decades, independently of the cameras and filters used.
The GRS looks less saturated today than in the past, although the bands still look very much the same... But it might as well be the other way around (the bands might be getting more contrasted).

It's easy to dismiss any differences based on poor hardware and filter combinations (like Voyager's OGV vidicon compared to Cassini RGB CCD images... ). Perhaps satellite transits can be used to color balance the old images.

What would be the smallest size of telescope your talking about?

The GRS has become fainter and is about a quarter of its size in the late 1800s. It may have been even larger than that at one time, but that is speculation, since before the photo I posted we are dependent on drawings.

Chris Go has some amazing pictures showing the still-absent SEB, in addition to the GRS exhibiting a richer and darker colour than usual:

http://www.christone.net/astro/jupiter/index.htm