JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE: Jupiter

The latest photos from the James Webb Space Telescope were again noteworthy. While earlier shots peered deep into space, the newest two featured Jupiter:

See that white spot? This is the Great Red Spot, a storm so big that it could swallow Planet Earth. Why is the color white? That circle reflects a lot of sunlight. This is the usual graphic.

The image also shows two tiny moons, Amalthea and Adrastea.

How many of you know how many moons are circling Jupiter? There are 80, plus other moonlets.

The largest moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, all discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. There is a naming-pattern to these moons: lovers and sexual partners of Roman god Jupiter, or his Greek equivalent Zeus. 23 of them have yet to be named. They should begin to add those of Eros.

Actually, there are Chinese astronomical records reporting in 356 BC that Gan De detected a moon of Jupiter, probably Ganymede, with the naked eye. Reportedly, he used a tree to "occult" the planet itself, allowing him to distinguish the moon. With Shi Shen, they compiled the first star catalogue, even before those from Babylonia and Greek Hipparchus.

Ganymede is the largest, the ninth-biggest object in our Solar System. Mercury is #10. To the right, Earth, Moon on top and Ganymede on bottom.

Ganymede is almost all iron, silicate rock and water.
There is a suspected internal ocean that may contain more water than Planet Earth.
Has already been visited by four NASA missions, with the European Space Agency scheduled to send Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (of course, JUICE) next year.

If you think the JWST has a great camera...no. Here is what they need to do:

Data from telescopes like Webb doesn’t arrive on Earth neatly packaged. Instead, it contains information about the brightness of the light on Webb’s detectors. This information arrives at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI, Baltimore, Maryland), Webb’s mission and science operations center, as raw data. STScI processes the data into calibrated files for scientific analysis and delivers it to the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes for dissemination. Scientists then translate that information into images like these during the course of their research (here’s a podcast about that). While a team at STScI formally processes Webb images for official release, non-professional astronomers known as citizen scientists often dive into the public data archive to retrieve and process images, too.

Citizens help too, and the two images above involved the collaboration of people like Judy Schmidt of Modesto, California. She has had no formal training. Here she is with another her contributions: Minkowski's Butterfly, a planetary nebula in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

Then there are other kinds of image makers. We know some as photographers.

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics. Thursday was my pandemic day for years. Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments. All these subvariants derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms. One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell. From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant, BA.2.86, also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to lose hair for...

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

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