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Well, I'm confused. Both my neighbor and I observed three dark spots traversing the equator, as in my rather pathetic retouched sketch, below. This is as it appeared at about 10pm MDT. One had to be a satellite, but in my past observations these have always appeared lighter than the surface of the planet, not darker. I had about an hour of good seeing, good enough for a fairly steady image through the 8mm Brandon with barlow. I called it quits when the image began to degrade, and missed the re-emergence of Io. All in all, though, it was quite a spectacle.

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Hi ColoHank.
I think one of the dark spots you saw was Ganymede itself. That moon is rather greyish and shows up against the brighter clouds of Jupiter.

My view of the shadows with the ol' Q was quite nice.
Even using 86x, the big shadow of Ganymede and the tinier shadow of Europa could be seen pretty clearly. Ganymede's shadow was right on the limb of the planet and looked like somebody had taken a tiny bite outta Jupiter.

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A few telescopes of dubious value.
Understanding wife, two curious cats and one sadly departed.

"Semper ubi sub ubi"

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