Confucius said, “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
When it comes to Jupiter, Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran can certainly see it. And lucky for us, they have the skill to bring that beauty to the fore for the rest of us to enjoy.
The Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam instrument takes raw unprocessed photos of Jupiter, and NASA puts them up on the web for people to work with. NASA shares some of those images with the rest of us. This new image of Jupiter’s swirling, mesmerizing cloud tops is from the JunoCam, and Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran, two names familiar to Jupiter fans, have worked their magic on it.
The raw image was captured during Juno’s 16th close flyby of Jupiter, on October 29th 2018. It shows the “white oval” feature, which is an anticyclonic storm, and some white “pop-up” clouds. Pop-ups are storms that rise above the other clouds, sometimes casting shadows.
This image was captured when Juno was about 4,400 miles from the planet’s cloud tops, and at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees north.
As a pair, Eichstädt and Doran have produced many gorgeous images of Jupiter.
You can find more of Gerald Eichstädt’s and Seán Doran’s work at The Planetary Society’s website. At NASA’s JunoCam processing site, you can find more of their work, and more work from other citizen scientists.
More:
- Gerald Eichstadt’s YouTube Channel
- Sean Doran’s YouTube Channel
- JunoCam’s Image Processing Gallery