As we celebrate the start of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, another space event that
began 25 years after Neil, Buzz, and Mike began their journey atop a Saturn 5 rocket
took place roughly 400 million miles from Earth at the planet Jupiter.

The comet known as Shoemaker-Levy 9, which had broken up earlier into at least 20
main fragments thanks to Jupiter's massive bulk, began slamming into the gas giant world,
creating impacts that were visible even in amateur telescopes.

Dark areas the size of our planet appeared in a long chain across the face of Jove for
days from these impacts. The larger fragments created mushroom clouds from their
impacts that were 1,200 kilometers tall!

I well remember this event. I even had a chance to look at Jupiter through a telescope
on the night it all began, but I was a bit early for viewing the impact markings. PBS had
live extensive coverage as they often did in those days. This was also one of the early
big events shown on the very young World Wide Web.

As the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11 was also happening at this time, the news media
naturally tried to combine and contrast what was happening at Jupiter then with what
took place on the Moon a quarter-century earlier. They even replayed ABC-TV's
coverage of the Apollo 11 landing, which I videotaped. Lots of models and hand-made
drawings were used to show the audience what was going on and just what those guys
up there on the Moon and down in Mission Control were talking about.

I recall some folks half-jokingly saying that the comet impacts on Jupiter were the
Cosmos' way of marking and celebrating Apollo 11's silver anniversary. I hope the
Universe doesn't get carried away for the fiftieth anniversary a decade from now!

Lots of good images and info on comet SL-9 here:

http://seds.org/archive/sl9/sl9.html