Hubble Shoots Gunshot Jupiter

I don't know if my readers have caught this, but Jupiter got whacked last weekend. Hubble was retasked to capture some images of the impact site...

The checkout and calibration of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been interrupted to aim the recently refurbished observatory at a new expanding spot on the giant planet Jupiter. The spot, caused by the impact of a comet or an asteroid, is changing from day to day in the planet’s cloud tops.

Full story here (along with this and two other images). As is delightfully often the case, the first spotting of this feature was by an amateur astronomer, who was taking "one last picture." "Bad Astronomy" first brought this to my attention, confirmed that it was probably an impact, and had a nice followup piece yesterday, saying there's no reasonable doubt anymore. The CS Monitor had a decent (if predictable) analysis piece this morning, but when I saw the image above, I had to pass it along. Click the pic to enlargify; this was the smallest of the three sizes offered!

What an amazing piece of equipment!

Followup: I hadn't seen it yet, but yesterday's APOD was the original image of the impact scar captured by the enthusiast in Australia.