If you go outside a couple of hours after sunset tonight and look east, you'll see a very bright "star" in the sky. That's Jupiter. If you look at it with a nice telescope equipped with a good camera and filter set, and you have the patience to spend a bit of time afterwards putting the images together into a brief animation, you'll see this:
[embed width="610"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MTImmCn8rk[/embed]
Cool, eh? [Make sure you set it to higher resolution to get the full effect.] That was done by Dutch "amateur" astronomer Henk Mannetje Emil Kraaikamp. Jupiter appears to roll across the screen because he aligned all the images on the clouds you can see on the planet; keep your eyes on the Great Red Spot, for example, and you'll see it doesn't move inside the frame. So as Jupiter's rapid rotation (once every ten hours or so) makes it spin visibly even ...
