Mark Megahan
One thing is guaranteed, you’ve never seen Jupiter like this before, up close and personal with a custom-enhanced color paint job. NASA’s Juno probe snapped the image as it whizzed past recently, catching the giant planet in “true color.” After that, software engineer Björn Jónsson went to work and colorized it with psychedelic precision.
Jupiter in true and enhanced color
The first thing Juno did was record the high definition “true color” images of Jupiter which capture all the tiny details, close up. These “stunning” new JunoCam images were observed on the 43rd close flyby of the craft on July 5.
Once they beamed down to Earth, NASA made them fully available to the public. That was software engineer Björn Jónsson’s cue to add a touch of color. Something to make the finer fractal intricacy stand out.
For starters, Mr. Jónsson “processed one image to portray the approximate colors that would be seen by the human eye from Juno’s vantage point.” Then he dropped some digital “acid” into the system and created another.
Using the same data, with “increased saturation and contrast which gave a clearer and more colorful view of Jupiter.” Electrically more colorful. The complex colors and swirling patterns would make a great poster.
Jónsson notes that his process sharpens the small scale features. Special processing, he adds, “was also used to reduce compression artifacts and noise in the image.” One thing is certain, Sol 5 isn’t just the largest planet in our system, Jupiter is a baby sun waiting to ignite.
A “massive ball of gas that is made mostly of hydrogen and helium, with some heavy elements.” All we get to see is the top layer of the atmosphere but that great red spot is a storm that’s been raging for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Clouds of ammonia
What we see from Earth as the familiar stripes and swirls of Jupiter “are actually cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.” All by itself the Jovian giant is “twice as large as all of the other planets combined, and the Great Red Spot alone is large enough to fit the entire Earth inside.”
When the shutter snapped on this image, Juno was “3,300 miles (5,300 kilometres) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 50 degrees.”
It was zipping past at about 130,000 mph, relative to the planet. Mr. Jónsson considers himself “a citizen scientist” and “advanced amateur planetary image processor.” Not only that, depicting the cloud structure of Jupiter in neon gives him a helpful hobby.
“His processed images also show the three-dimensional nature of Jupiter’s great swirling vortices, and the smaller, bright ‘pop-up’ clouds that form in the higher parts of the atmosphere.”
NASA points out that “no previous spacecraft has orbited so close to Jupiter, although two others have been sent plunging to their destruction through its atmosphere.” These particular images popped up “just a few days after the James Webb Space Telescope captured the stunning auroras glowing around Jupiter’s north and south poles.”
Astronomers note that while the planet rotates, “it drags its magnetic field that is bombarded by particles of solar wind, resulting in fluctuations that create auroras.“
