The discovery was made on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the 15th anniversary of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 colliding with Jupiter.
Wesley recorded the discovery in his observation log: “I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiter’s south polar region [and] started to get curious,” he said. “My next thought was that it must be either a dark moon ... or a moon shadow, but it was in the wrong place and the wrong size.”
“By two o’clock I’d come back up to the house and was sending alerts to all the people I could think of that should be looking at this and especially the professional astronomers with specialized instruments for measuring this,” he said.
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