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astronomy cast episode 691 Jupiter's changing red spot

welcome to astronomy cast from weekly facts based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know

my name is Fraser Kane I'm the publisher of universe today and with me as always is dr. Pamela Kay a senior scientist for the planetary science institute and the director of

Cosmo quest hey Pamela how you doing I'm doing well how are you doing little sad we know we had to say goodbye to our dog this week so that's just hard on the heart

yeah it is you know you sort of spend all this time have all this love but then you sort of know it's time yeah so the best things in light of life are fleeting yeah yeah yeah and I think you know it's it's uh so for those of you who do have your fur babies give them a hug and a kiss from us Jupiter's great red spot is one of its most iconic features

first seen hundreds of years ago although it's certainly long lasting it's been changing inside over the last few decades shrinking changing in color is it fading away and what can the

changes tell us about storms on giant planets all right so those of you listening this might not know but this is the second time that we tried to record this

episode and so I'm gonna remember what I asked you last time which was when was the first time that you saw Jupiter's great red spot so so for me I think it was probably at some

random point when I was in elementary school my parents got me the exact type of telescope we tell people never to get do not get one of these

I had like a Sears Thanksgiving Day sale 4 inch Newtonian telescope that I did my best to look at absolutely everything with and I have no memory of seeing Jupiter but I know I must

have because I pretty much looked at everything out there to be seen except for Andromeda because I could never find Andromeda as a kid that that would have to wait till I moved

somewhere other than Boston you're waiting for me to tell you what was for me to fight Andromeda because that's what we talked about last time yeah it's funny how how this works yeah so you know I live in dark skies and grew up in like whatever the cold the

darkest border skies you could get and you know it's not quite as good now but it was definitely very very dark skies and so you could just

see Andromeda with the unated eye and so you would sort of unfocused your eyes look in the sky and you would see this blurry blob and you

like oh there's Andromeda and then you would point your telescope at that thing and for you you had to start hop your way there.

And and the problem was that I could like see Cassiopia I could see the square of of Pegasus but not really the legs and the square was kind of iffy

and there's just this vast swath of nothing between the square and the w and that was not quite enough to stir up so yeah.

So for me I bought my first telescope when I was 14 and and I sort of did write I got a proper four and a half inch Newtonian

reflector paid a couple hundred dollars of my you know hard saved money and it didn't have an equatorial amount

it's in Altaz mount but it was still a pretty good telescope and I had a bunch of eyepieces with it and so I was able to see Jupiter right away

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