Public
- Public
- Network
- Groups
- Featured
- Popular
- People

Jupiter dominates the black background of space. The image is a composite, and shows Jupiter in enhanced color, featuring the planet’s famous Great Red Spot, which appears white with light pink around the edges. The planet is striated with swirling horizontal stripes of green, periwinkle, light pink, and cream. Horizontally across the equator is a wide cream-colored band, whose height extends about 1/7 of the planet. This is the planet’s equatorial zone. The stripes across the planet interact and mix at their edges. Along both of the northern and southern poles, the planet glows in green. Bright red auroras glow just above the planet’s surface at both poles.

Download link

Jupiter dominates the black background of space. The image is a composite, and shows Jupiter in enhanced color, featuring the planet’s famous Great Red Spot, which appears white with light pink around the edges. The planet is striated with swirling horizontal stripes of green, periwinkle, light pink, and cream. Horizontally across the equator is a wide cream-colored band, whose height extends about 1/7 of the planet. This is the planet’s equatorial zone. The stripes across the planet interact and mix at their edges. Along both of the northern and southern poles, the planet glows in green. Bright red auroras glow just above the planet’s surface at both poles.
https://cdn.masto.host/astrodonsocial/media_attachments/files/111/262/578/424/732/447/original/2340f3579d7419b9.png

Notices where this attachment appears

Embed this notice
Kelly Lepo (kellylepo@astrodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 15:06:06 JST Kelly Lepo

Jupiter is actually quite difficult to observe with #JWST's large mirror. The planet is so bright that researchers had to use clever techniques to avoid saturating the telescope's detectors.
The result of those efforts is this NIRCam image of Jupiter. The white areas are very high-altitude cloud tops. The dark ribbons north of the equatorial region have little cloud cover. Auroras, extending to high altitudes above the planet's north and south poles, are seen in red.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-147

In conversation about a year ago from astrodon.social permalink