It’s not your imagination, although it is a bit hard to discern since the equatorial zone is relatively featureless and thus is hard to track. It is a bit easier to track the Great Red Spot (GRS) as it comes over the western edge and compare it to a white spot which happens to be almost directly south of the GRS center at that time. As the GRS reaches the eastern edge, that same white spot is distinctly behind even the dark disruption zone surrounding the GRS.

On the other hand, the Jovian atmosphere has a lot of relative movement as can be seen on this graph showing the speeds of its different zones compared to the poles as detected by the Voyagers and Cassini (yes, made during its gravitational boost in 2000 on its way to Saturn):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wind_speeds_on_Jupiter.png

although by my reckoning from this graph the GRS–which happens to be at the slowest point of this graph–should have been dropping behind that particular white spot.

What a privilege.

“By Jove.”

It looks as though, if you drew a set of longitude lines on the planet, the equatorial clouds would pass over them faster than those at the poles.

But I could just be woozy.

Not likely. While those white spots are about in the same band as the impacts made by Shoemaker-Levy in 1994, the general phenomenon of the white spots long preceded that impact (for example: they can be seen in that Jovian band in pictures taken by the two Voyagers in 1979). At best comet and asteroid impacts seem to be very transient staining the Jovian atmosphere as long as a couple of weeks. Even the smaller storms which include the white spots generally last in the range of 1-3 years so all of them that we see now on Jupiter probably were not there at the time of the Shoemaker-Levy impact.

Just FYI: the Great Red Spot is in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere–I had to check that because for some reason I always think of it as being in its northern hemisphere (yeah, yeah, my bias is showing).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=RdIfnymd9Aw

… and one where you can see some of Jupiter’s moons as it rotates, giving the video a more three-dimensional feel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7imqLyR_u6s

I feel a sense of deja vu, like Phil posted the same video months ago. Am I nuts? I have been pulling an all-nighter, that might ‘splain it.

You’re thinking of this one:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/09/jupiter-rolls-into-view/

Still exciting, though.

Jupiter’s moons can easily be seen with a good pair of binoculars. My 8.5x Swarvoski bins pick them out sharply. And apparently you can see at least one moon with naked eye providing 1) you block out the light of Jupiter with a foreground object, 2) the moon is furthest out from Jupiter at the time, and 3) you are slightly sharp-sighted (or perfect vision with no astigmatism).

Id say that since Jupiter’s rotation period is about ten hours there’s no way you could view a whole rotation, or two as in this video, from a single point on earth, as our night simply isn’t that long. The video must be edited together from several nights’ viewing. The blurry line will be the point at which different shots were ‘stitched’ together.
Very well done if you ask me.