Colourful swirling cloud belts dominate Jupiter’s southern hemisphere in this image captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
Jupiter appears in this colour-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 16 December 2017 at 1812 GMT, as Juno performed its tenth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 13,604 kilometers (8,453 miles) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of 27.9 degrees south.
The spatial scale in this image is 9.1 kilometers/pixel (5.6 miles/pixel).
Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager.
