Image Cache: I’m not usually one of those “check out this beautiful planet photo” people (jk, I am). But seriously, the images coming from the citizen scientists looking at Juno data are all incredible. I’m not sure how this latest one can even be real.
Image: NASA/Gerald Eichstädt
Browse through the cool photos, animations and diagrams in Gizmodo’s Image Cache here.
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.
Juno snapped this image with its JunoCam on 16 December 2017, when it was almost 104,446km 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 with a telescope.
Anyway, take a break, enjoy this picture of space.
[NASA]