NASA has just published a new image of the giant planet, Jupiter to coincide with its annual opposition this week. However, there is something extraordinary about this photo—taken by the Hubble space telescope, orbiting Earth—that makes it unique. So unique, in fact, that Jupiter’s giant storm, known as the Great Red Spot, in this image, looks blue.
The image therefore makes use of false color. Three different wavelengths of ultraviolet light were captured by Hubble, each of which was then assigned a different colour—blue, green, and red—so that it makes sense to us.Beneath the center of the image is the planet’s famous Great Red Spot, an anticyclonic storm roughly the diameter of Earth.
The new ultraviolet image is part of research into Jupiter’s superstorm system. The next task is to use the data to map deep water clouds and define 3D cloud structures in Jupiter’s atmosphere.