Enormous planet-sized vortex, or a marble countertop? (NASA/JunoCam/Kevin Gill)
New photos have dropped from NASA’s JunoCam, the camera on board the Juno spacecraft currently orbiting around Jupiter. Since the spacecraft’s arrival into the planet’s orbit in 2016, JunoCam has been providing us with stunning images of the solar system’s largest planet—and these new photos are no exception!
We’ve selected some amazing photos for all the space lovers out there. Get ready for some incredible detail!
Picture perfect
Wow! Jupiter, is that you? (NASA/JunoCam/Kevin Gill)
What's really interesting is that these images are a mixture of NASA's pictures and the talents of photo editors here on Earth.
JunoCam will upload raw, unedited photos on a website and encourage people to download and edit the images. With editing software, the colours of the original photo can be slightly modified to highlight certain details.
Anyone can download the raw images, and NASA encourages everyone to upload their own edited versions!
One of our favourite amateur NASA photo editors is Kevin Gill, who edited these photos the planet’s swirly clouds that you see in this post.
Stormy weather
Bubble, bubble, swirling trouble! (NASA/JunoCam/Kevin Gill)
It sort of looks like we’re peeking into a witch’s cauldron, or into some kind of thick, bubbly soup. Only these spirals and swirls are actually cold, windy clouds made from ammonia and water, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. That’s one storm you don’t want to caught in the middle of!
With no solid planetary surface to slow them down, Jupiter's storms can persist for many years. In fact, the Great Red Spot (a swirling storm twice as wide as the Earth) has been observed on the giant planet for more than 300 years—that’s a long storm!
Given the fact that Juno's mission still has quite a bit of time left, it seems like we’ll be doing a lot more space storm watching in the future. Thanks JunoCam!
Wow! It’s hard to wrap your head around how big these things are.