A trail of impact sites An image of Jupiter taken from the Calar Alto 3.5 meter telescope on at 22:45 GMT on July 18 1994, a few hours after the impact of Fragment H from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The image was taken in the infrared at a wavelength of 1.7 microns in order to enhance the contrast between Jupiter and the impact sites. The bright object just off Jupiter's disk to the upper right is the satellite Ganymede, the large oval near the center is the Great Red Spot, and each of the six fainter blobs near the bottom of the image are impact sites. From right to left, the spots are: G2, D4, H1, F3, E4, A6 where the letter refers to the impacting fragment and the number refers to the number of times the impact site has rotated into view (i.e. F3 has appeared on the Earth-facing side of Jupiter for the third time). Two pairs of spots (G2, D4 and F3, E4) lie close together. Jupiter rotates once in approximately 10 hours. By the end of this week (22 July), there should be fifteen to twenty such spots encircling Jupiter's southern hemisphere like a string of pearls. Observers at Calar Alto: Tom Herbst, Kurt Birkle, Ulrich Thiele (Max-Plack-Institut fuer Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany) Doug Hamilton (Max-Plack-Institut fuer Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany) Hermann Boenhardt, Alex Fiedler, Karl-Heinz Mantel (Universitaets Sternwarte Muenchen, Germany) Jose Luis Ortiz (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, Granada, Spain) Giovanni Calamai, Andrea Richichi (Osservatorio di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy) Contact: Mark McCaughrean, Max-Planck-Institut fuer Astronomie Koenigstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany Phone: (49) 6221 528 303 FAX: (49) 6221 528 246 e-mail mjm@mpia-hd.mpg.de (Internet)