Portal:Jupiter/Meteor/3

Meteors
"EVERYBODY who watched the sun with a telescope last summer must have wondered at the great belt of spots lying across the southern part of the disk during the last half of July. Several of the spots and groups were of extraordinary size, and their arrangement was very singular. When the belt extended completely across the sun, there was visible at one time almost every characteristic form that sun-spots present. There was the yawning black chasm with sharply defined yet ragged edges, vast enough to swallow up the whole earth, with room to spare, and surrounded by a regular penumbral border as evenly shaded as an artist could have made it; there was the double or triple spot whose black centers, though widely separated from one another, were tangled, as it were, in one twisted and torn veil of penumbra, or connected by long, shadowy bands; there was the monstrous spot of grotesque form surrounded by a crowd of smaller spots of even more fantastic shape, and enveloped in a broad, irregular penumbra as bizarre and wonderful as the mighty sun-chasms inclosed in it; there was the great spot, often of singular outline, accompanied outside its shadowy borders by one or more swarms of minute black specks pitting the white photosphere in the most extraordinary fashion; there was the huge group, visible even to the unassisted eye, and consisting of half a dozen or more large spots intermingled with smaller ones whose number seemed to defy counting, and enveloped in a penumbral cloak of becoming amplitude; there, near the edges of the disk, were the crinkling lines and heaped-up masses of faculæ, the mountainous hydrogen-flames which marked the places where the intensest solar action was going on—in short, there was a panorama in which every variety of sun-spot seemed to be passing in a gigantic procession across the disk. And what a procession it was!—long enough, nearly, to reach from the earth to the moon and back again three times!"

The appearance of Jupiter during sun flare activity is shown.