Tag Archives: Great Red Spot

In the Sky This Week – May 21, 2019

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This entry is part 98 of 179 in the series In the Sky This Week

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is Unraveling! As I was writing this post, I came upon this story on SpaceWeather.com: Around the world, amateur astronomers are monitoring a strange phenomenon on the verge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS). The giant storm appears to be unraveling. “I haven’t seen this before in my 17-or-so years of imaging Jupiter,” reports veteran observer Anthony Wesley of Australia, who photographed a streamer of gas detaching itself from the GRS on May 19th -SpaceWeather.com I realized I should probably headline this topic when I immediately stopped what I was doing, and went upstairs to tell my wife about it! Jupiter returns the the evening sky, rising in the southeastern sky around 10:30 PM. The Moon dances with Saturn and Jupiter for the next several days in the predawn sky: Mars will soon be lost on the glare of the sunset in the west-northwestern sky. Globular cluster Messier 68 The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope offers this … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Hidden Complications

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This entry is part 13 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in July 2017 Following on last week’s reposting, here’s yet another Juno column! [Two years] ago, Nasa’s Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter orbit (as described in my Tablet column for July 2016). Its highly elliptical path periodically brings it close to the tops of Jupiter’s clouds, and this month one such low pass brought it right over the famous Red Spot, a hurricane-like storm some three times larger than planet Earth. The storm appears to have been raging in Jupiter’s atmosphere for at least three hundred years; Cassini first described it in 1665, though the first color depiction of it is in a painting from 1711, on display in the Vatican Museum. The internet is now full of glorious, if somewhat gaudy, images of swirls and eddies seen by the Juno camera. In fact, the camera on the Juno spacecraft was an afterthought. Since the science team was put together to probe Jupiter with … Continue reading →

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from Juno

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The Juno spacecraft made its seventh close approach (perijove) to Jupiter on July 10th, flying directly over the Great Red Spot. The raw images from the mission are publicly available, and have been post-processed by several different individuals. The results are as beautiful as they are varied. This stunning image, processed by Seán Doran, was featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day on July 15, 2017: Here are some more examples of post-processing from the imaging community: This image was processed by Jason Major, who runs the fantastic Lights in the Dark website; the image was used in this post by NASA. This video was created using the NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System app shows the Juno spacecraft coming up on the Great Red Spot; I knew the storm was big, but I’ve never seen it from this perspective… it’s BIG! This video gives you a good idea of how close the Juno spacecraft gets to Jupiter during … Continue reading →