[Az-Geocaching] Celebrity in our midst.

[Jim Scotti]

Wow, that was a fun night at the telescope!  It was the night of March 25-26,
1993 and I think it was around dinner time that David Levy called me from
Palomar about their new comet suspect.  They described it and it's position
motion and brightness and I warned them that the cloudy weather that was on
top of them was going to make for an uncertain night, but that I'd be happy
to confirm their object.  But I also caused them some concern by asking a few
questions, for example, their image was elongated in a way that pointed right
straight back towards Jupiter, just 4 degrees away on the sky (about 8 times
the diameter of the moon) and the object moved almost exactly like Jupiter on
the sky, so I was worried it might be an optical reflection in the telescope
of Jupiter.  It was approaching midnight when David called me back about the
confirmation & I had just started the 2nd images of the comet, having just
been jolted through the ceiling by seeing it about 10 or 15 minutes earlier
for the first time.  The image I had seen appeared to me as follows.  As the
image read out of the CCD detector on the telescope, I saw it appear from the
west.  Having confirmed a number of comets over the years and having observed
nearly 100 of them at that time, I knew what comets looked like & what to
expect, but as comets have always reminded me, one should never forget that
they can do some very interesting things.  I had seen comets with two tails
and comets that had split into multiple pieces before, but all of that did
not prepare me for the image that was in the next star field!  First, there
was what appeared to be a tail on my screen.  At that point, I knew their
comet was no telescope reflection, but was real.  Then as more of the image
appeared, there was a second tail (in the following image, the bottom of this
image appeared first on my screen).  I thought - cool, nice comet!  Then the
first nucleus appeared & to me it just looked like a normal, but pretty neat
comet.  Then the next bit of the image appeared - it contained a whole string
of comet nuclei!  I think it was that moment that my jaw dropped to the floor
in amazement.  And finally, the trail on the other side of the string
appeared.  Here is a URL with an image I took a couple nights later that
shows you what I saw that night:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/spacewatch/Photos/p_sl9_30.jpg

So when David called me on the phone a few minutes later, I was obviously
very excited.  I told him what I saw & talked to Gene Shoemaker as well.  We
even talked about how we figured that the comet must have passed very close
to Jupiter recently and have been broken up by that close passage, but we had
no idea of the show we were in store for.  If someone had suggested that
night that the comet was orbiting Jupiter and would crash into the planet in
14 months time, I would have laughed them off the mountain!

BTW, I did not coin the term "String of Pearls", I think that was Dave Jewitt
or Jane Luu who observed it a few nights later from Hawaii.  I was calling it
a train of nuclei, though.  On the discovery announcment, I described the
string of nuclei as "a long narrow train" with "at least 5 discernible
condenstations" visible within the train.  It was called comet Shoemaker-Levy
right away and later when found to be at least in orbit around the sun (but
not certainly Jupiter), it was called Periodic comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (or S-L
9) since it was the 9th short period comet found by the Shoemakers and David
Levy.

Jim.

On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Jim Stamm wrote:

> Jim Scotti wrote on 4/10/02 8:38 AM :
> 
> >Between Near Earth Asteroids and comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (you may remember the
> >comet that broke up while orbiting Jupiter and crashed into the planet in
> >July 1994).
> 
> What we weren't told (except by David Levy, the discoverer himself) was 
> that Jim was actually the first person to see S-M 9 as a multiple object 
> (I think he used the term "string of pearls").  David called Jim at the 
> observatory on the night of discovery because S-M 9 looked so strange to 
> the team of discoverers, and Jim visually confirmed what was later to 
> become the most fantastic solar system event in human history.
> 
> Have I gotten this all correct Jim?
> 
> -Jim
> 
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Jim Scotti                              
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory         jscotti@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu 
University of Arizona                
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/