Stunning new photos of Jupiter

[GargoyleWB]

@Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil

[shrug]
Seriously, they’re very impressive, thanks. Remembering the slightly blurry pics I used to see in the 80s, it’s hardly the Jupiter I used to know.

I even recall some articles back in the 70s/80s that said that the detail we saw was a consequence of viewing so far away, and if one was very close to Jupiter it would be even more fuzzy and indistinct when those features are smeared out in your field of view. Sort of the ‘martian canal’ effect applied to Jupiter.

[DesertDog]

@Elendil_s_Heir

The only thing missing is a teeny little graphic of Earth to put it all in perspective

Although it doesn’t appear prominently in any of the shots I scanned quickly past, if the Great Red Spot is visible, two earth will just fit inside it.

[Two_Many_Cats]

And of course, the comments section quickly devolves into “God shows His Glory!” “God doesn’t exist!” “Yes He does!” “No he doesn’t!” “You’re stupid!” “No you’re stupid!” debacle, and just as quickly forgets Jupiter altogether.

[John_Mace]

@Two_Many_Cats

And of course, the comments section quickly devolves into “God shows His Glory!” “God doesn’t exist!” “Yes He does!” “No he doesn’t!” “You’re stupid!” “No you’re stupid!” debacle, and just as quickly forgets Jupiter altogether.

They’re probably just noting that Jupiter [Dieus-pater]= God the Father, so Jupiter shows His Glory!

[MrDibble]

Great photos. To me, they look like gneiss or some other metamorphic rock.

It says right there in the OP’s link that the images are post-processed to something resembling true colour by “enthusiasts”

And it’s Pollock (sorry, that always bugs me. People will link to paintings where it’s spelled right countless times, and still get it wrong themselves).

[JackieLikesVariety]

@Two_Many_Cats

And of course, the comments section quickly devolves into “God shows His Glory!” “God doesn’t exist!” “Yes He does!” “No he doesn’t!” “You’re stupid!” “No you’re stupid!” debacle, and just as quickly forgets Jupiter altogether.

what a damn shame this is

[Sir_T-Cups]

@Elendil_s_Heir

I believe they’re accurate. NASA always notes if an image is shown in false colors to better show contrasts, for instance. And the probe’s cameras were, I assume, finely calibrated before launch.

@Chronos

There’s no such thing as “true color” professional astronomical photographs. The cameras themselves are all black-and-white (fundamentally, that’s true of all cameras, even the ones you use), but take multiple images through multiple filters. If you want to produce images that correspond with what humans see, then you pick those filters to correspond to red, green, and blue, or some other approximation to what our eyes process. For scientific purposes, though, you’d pick filters that correspond to the spectral lines of particular elements or compounds. You can map those filters to red, green, and blue to make a picture a human can see, and they usually choose the mapping in such a way that is as close an approximation as possible to what the filters are actually detecting, but it’s still an approximation. There’s no reason you couldn’t put the same kind of filters on an astronomical instrument as on a consumer camera, but every gram of weight and every second of observing time matters, so in practice, they don’t.

Thank you both for your responses! I guess what you’re saying is that even though the pictures are taken in black and white, it’s basically what Jupiter would look like if I was floating in space right by it.

I’ve always wondered because it’s so far away and no one has ever actually seen it so, like, how do we KNOW that’s what it looks like? File it under “holy crap the concept of space is maddening”

[MrDibble]

@Sir_T-Cups

I’ve always wondered because it’s so far away and no one has ever actually seen it

We see it all the time. Most any night, really. Anyone with a good enough telescope could get an idea of the right colours, what this gives us is the fine details. But the right colours to use aren’t some mystery.