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Jupiter Showcases Auroras, Hazes (NIRCam Closeup)
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Image processing by Judy Schmidt.
2022-07-27
- Classification
- Photograph
- Museum
- Wikimedia Commons
- Credit line
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/52303461859/
- Rights
- Public domain, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
About this work
Jupiter dominates the black background of space. The image is a composite, and shows Jupiter in enhanced color, featuring the planet’s turbulent Great Red Spot, which appears white here. The planet is striated with swirling horizontal stripes of neon turquoise, periwinkle, light pink, and cream. The stripes interact and mix at their edges like cream in coffee. Along both of the poles, the planet glows in turquoise. Bright orange auroras glow just above the planet’s surface at both poles.
“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. 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. Webb itself is an international mission led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
This image comes from the observatory’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which has three specialized infrared filters that showcase details of the planet. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the light has been…
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