The American space agency NASA shared on Sunday an impressive image of the largest planet of our solar system, Jupiter. Via Instagram, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that the Juno spacecraft took the photo when it completed its 43rd flyby of Jupiter over the planet’s North Pole in July 2022.
“The JunoCam instrument captured the spectacular view of vortices — hurricane-like spiral wind patterns — near Jupiter’s north pole,” the space agency said.
Take a look below:
The image shows storms on Jupiter in shades of blue and white. They appear in large swirling patterns with wavy patterns emerging between the circles.
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Shared just a few hours ago, the photo has already garnered over a million likes. Netizens flooded the comments section with love and fire emojis. While some users called the image “amazing”, others called it “beautiful”.
One user compared the image of Jupiter to Vincent van Gogh’s famous “Starry Night” painting and asked: “The starry night…is that you.” Another said, “This is literally so amazing.”
A third commented, “Jupiter was painted by Van Gogh,” while a fourth added: “Absolutely amazing!”
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In the caption, NASA said that citizen scientist Brian Swift created the enhanced color and contrast view of the eddies using raw JunoCam image data. At the time the raw photo was taken, the Juno spacecraft was about 25,100 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloud tops, the space agency said.
He also added that strong storms on Jupiter can be more than 50 kilometers in height and hundreds of miles in diameter. “Without a solid surface to slow them down, storms can last for years and pack winds of up to 335 mph (539 km/h),” the post’s caption read.
