UNITED STATES: The largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter, has always had the same appearance. Most of us recall the gas giant from our schoolbooks and textbooks as a yellowish-orange spherical. However, NASA’s James Webb telescope has now produced fresh photographs of Jupiter that depict the planet differently.
James Webb Telescope captures stunning images of Jupiter
NASA’s most recent infrared photos of Jupiter show the planet in a greenish blue hue. The photographs depict the planet in its fullness, including all of its distinguishing features, such as the enormous storms, auroras, and regions of extreme temperature. Check out the images.
Planetary astronomer Imke de Pater said in a press release, “We hadn’t really expected it to be this wonderful, to be honest.” Thierry Fouchet, a Professor at the Paris Observatory, and De Pater, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, were the observers of Jupiter.
Fouchet said it was “really remarkable” that they could see details of Jupiter, its rings, tiny satellites, and even galaxies in one image.
As NASA notes in a blog post, images from the James Webb Telescope do not always arrive in the same format as what we see online. Instead, scientists receive a set of data recorded by the James Webb Space Telescope’s light detectors.
These data fragments are then combined and processed by the STScI (Space Telescope Science Institute) to create the images we see.
Judy Schmidt of Modesto, California, a seasoned image processor in the citizen scientific community, processed the most recent Jupiter photographs seen here.
For the second image (the one showing the rings and moons), Schmidt also worked with co-investigator Ricardo Hueso, who is based in Spain and studies planetary atmospheres at the University of the Basque Country.
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