Colorful swirling cloud belts dominate Jupiter’s southern hemisphere in this image captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
Jupiter appears in this color-enhanced image as a tapestry of vibrant cloud bands and storms. The dark region in the far left is called the South Temperate Belt. Intersecting the belt is a ghost-like feature of slithering white clouds. This is the largest feature in Jupiter’s low latitudes that’s a cyclone (rotating with clockwise motion).
This image was taken on Dec. 16, 2017 at 10:12 PST (1:12 p.m. EST), as Juno performed its tenth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 8,453 miles (13,604 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of 27.9 degrees south.
The spatial scale in this image is 5.6 miles/pixel (9.1 kilometers/pixel).
Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at:
www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam
More information about Juno is at:
https://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill