2/18/2023 0 Comments Nasa picture of the day jupiterThe rest of the image is the blackness of space, with faintly glowing white galaxies in the distance.Whenever Jupiter, thunderbolt-wielding lord of the gods in ancient Roman myth, misbehaved with the ladies, there was one person he most feared: his long-suffering yet ferocious wife, the goddess Juno. Slightly further to the left, another moon glows with tiny white diffraction spikes. At the far left edge of the rings, a moon appears as a tiny white dot. Along the planet’s equator, rings glow in a faint white. A white glow emanates out from the auroras. Electric blue auroras glow above Jupiter’s north and south poles. The planet’s swirling horizontal stripes are rendered in blues, browns, and cream. “The numerous bright white ‘spots’ and ‘streaks’ are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms.” By contrast, dark ribbons north of the equatorial region have little cloud cover.Ī wide-field view showcases Jupiter in the upper right quadrant. “The brightness here indicates high altitude – so the Great Red Spot has high-altitude hazes, as does the equatorial region,” said Heidi Hammel, Webb interdisciplinary scientist for solar system observations and vice president for science at AURA. The Great Red Spot, a famous storm so big it could swallow Earth, appears white in these views, as do other clouds, because they are reflecting a lot of sunlight. A third filter, mapped to blues, showcases light that is reflected from a deeper main cloud. A different filter, mapped to yellows and greens, shows hazes swirling around the northern and southern poles. The auroras shine in a filter that is mapped to redder colors, which also highlights light reflected from lower clouds and upper hazes. In the standalone view of Jupiter, created from a composite of several images from Webb, auroras extend to high altitudes above both the northern and southern poles of Jupiter. Scientists collaborated with citizen scientist Judy Schmidt to translate the Webb data into images. Generally, the longest wavelengths appear redder and the shortest wavelengths are shown as more blue. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the light has been mapped onto the visible spectrum. The two images come from the observatory’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which has three specialized infrared filters that showcase details of the planet. “It’s really remarkable that we can see details on Jupiter together with its rings, tiny satellites, and even galaxies in one image,” she said. Webb itself is an international mission led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). De Pater led the observations of Jupiter with Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory, as part of an international collaboration for Webb’s Early Release Science program. “We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team image processing by Judy Schmidt. Webb NIRCam composite image of Jupiter from three filters – F360M (red), F212N (yellow-green), and F150W2 (cyan) – and alignment due to the planet’s rotation.
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