Jupiter just got smacked by a space rock and an amateur astronomer caught it on camera - Space.com

Brazilian observer José Luis Pereira captured a bright flash on the solar system's largest planet Monday night (Sept. 13), memorializing the fiery death of a space rock high in the Jovian atmosphere.

"When the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are in opposition, I try to make images in every possible night of clear skies.

On Sunday (Sept. 12) and Monday, Pereira set up his equipment in São Caetano do Sul, in the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo.

As on many other nights, he aimed to photograph Jupiter and capture videos for the DeTeCt program, which seeks to spot and characterize impacts on the giant planet. .

The weather didn't look like it would cooperate on Monday night, but Pereira persevered, collecting a series of 25 Jupiter videos, with no time gap between them. .

"To my surprise, in the first video I noticed a different glow on the planet, but I didn't pay much attention to it as I thought it might be something related to the parameters adopted, and I continued watching normally," Pereira wrote.

"I checked the result only on the morning of the 14th, when the program alerted me to the high probability of impact and verified that there was indeed a record in the first video of the night," Pereira wrote. .

He then sent the information to Marc Delcroix of the French Astronomical Society, who confirmed that Pereira had indeed recorded footage of an impact that occurred Monday at 6:39 p.m.

If you're looking to learn more about how to photograph planets, check out our astrophotography for beginners guide for the basics.

"The site is clearly resolved and no visible scar was left (just as with previous impact flash events.) The object was probably too small to reach the deeper atmosphere," astrophotographer Damian Peach wrote on Twitter Wednesday, where he posted a gorgeous photo of a healed-up Jupiter taken an hour after it was hit.