Scientific illustration

The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact with Jupiter. In 1994 I had both illustrations (computer generated) of this event published in New Scientist magazine, and animations for the Reuters news service broadcast in 22 countries around the world.

Entirely co-incidentally, I had taken my family on holiday to California that month and was at Mount Palomar Observatory shortly after the K fragment impacted.

SL-9 had broken into many pieces; fragment G was estimated to have had an impact force of approximately 6 million megatons of TNT, and the fireball extended 3000km above the Jovian cloud tops. Fragment G was thought to have been around 3km in diameter.