felixb25•17d agoMost Upvoted

Found a photo of Jupiter from 2015 and compared it to one I took last night

I was digging through old hard drives and stumbled on a Jupiter shot I took with my old 8 inch Dobsonian back in 2015. The difference is INSANE - back then the Great Red Spot was this huge, obvious oval, but in my image from last week it looks way smaller and paler. Been reading that the spot has been shrinking for decades, but seeing it side by side really drove it home for me. Has anyone else noticed big changes in Jupiter's bands or spot from year to year in their own photos?

2 comments

2 Comments

reed.ray17d agoMost Upvoted

Hell yeah, I had the exact same gut check last year looking at my old shots vs new ones. I pulled a 2014 image from my 10 inch dob and a 2022 shot from my 12 inch, same basic processing too, and the red spot is just straight up smaller and weaker. @the_jade makes a point about conditions and gear but honestly, the difference is so obvious you can't blame it all on that. Even Jupiter's south equatorial band has been a mess lately, sometimes it looks almost gone for months at a time. It's wild to see a planet that's supposed to be constant change that fast in our own backyard.

the_jade17d ago

Oh boy, are we really going to get worked up over a cloud changing shape on a gas giant? I mean sure, the Great Red Spot has been shrinking for a while now, that's been known since the 1800s. But comparing two photos from just eight years apart and acting like the sky is falling seems a bit much. Different equipment, different atmospheric conditions on Earth, different processing of the images - that can account for a lot of what you're seeing. I'd want to see a controlled study with the same telescope and camera settings over decades before I start panicking.