I’m not usually one of those
“check out this beautiful planet photo” people (just joking, I am). But to be honest,
the recent images currently coming from the citizen scientists looking at NASA’s
Juno Spacecraft data are all incredible. I’m not sure how this latest one can
even be real.
I mean, yeah, of course it’s
real. You’re looking at the planet’s turbulent gas clouds of different
molecules swirling around the largest planet in our solar system. Some say
Jupiter’s most striking feature is its Great Red Spot. I’d argue it’s the deep,
swirling blues at the poles.
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| Image: NASA/Gerald Eichstädt |
Juno snapped this image with
its JunoCam on December 16, 2017, when it was almost 65,000 miles from the
planet’s cloud tops, according to a NASA release. That’s pretty far, a distance
greater than eight Earths stacked on top of one another. Jupiter itself is
around 11 Earths in diameter.
The raw data for these
images is all available on the MissionJuno website for people like you to
process. Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt can take credit for this amazing
image. And if you’re not good with computers, you can still see some pretty
fabulous views of Jupiter with a telescope.
Anyway, take a break, enjoy
this picture of space.
This article was initially published on Gizmodo. You can
read the article here.