NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured the true colors and structure of Jupiter’s clouds as it successfully completed its 43rd close flyby of the gas giant on July 5, 2022. Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson used the data to create the two images you see here collected by the JunoCam instrument aboard the spacecraft.
When the raw image was taken, Juno was flying around 3,300 miles (5,300 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 50°. The spacecraft was traveling at approximately 130,000 mph (209,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet. For those who don’t have a high-powered telescope at home, this is what happens when you zoom into Jupiter with a Nikon P1000 camera.
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The first image (left) was processed to portray the approximate colors that the human eye would see from Juno’s vantage point. The second image (right) comes from the same raw data, but in this case Jónsson digitally processed it to increase both the color saturation and contrast to sharpen small-scale features and to reduce compression artifacts and noise that typically appear in raw images,” said NASA.
