Welcome to Discussion

Jupiter has a dynamic atmosphere where winds in the belts (brown) and zones (white) go in opposite directions. Storms develop and evolve, and other atmospheric features come and go.  An imaging team, the scientists that operate the cameras on NASA missions, always begins with a discussion phase that covers what we know and what we would like to learn.  You are a member of our JunoCam virtual imaging team.  This discussion page is a place for general thoughts about Jupiter and your questions and ideas.

Campaigns

Campaigns are topics for discussion, and may become candidates for targeting during Perijove passes.

Jovian Moons

Images of Io, Europa, Ganymede or Callisto

Discuss

Rings

When the lighting is right

Discuss

Storm Movies

Timelapse sequences to see clouds in motion

Discuss

Lightning

Trying to capture a flash

Discuss

Cylindrical Map

We use images from amateur astronomers (uploaded on the Planning page) to create a new cylindrical map every 14 days. This is the latest one! We have identified long-lived storms as Points of Interest (POI’S) and invite you to share your thoughts about them.
Random Spot [ID: 1224] - currently : 28.602° latitude, 187.02° longitude A Whirl of a Pearl [ID: 1181] - currently : -39.042° latitude, 131.112° longitude Between the Pearls [ID: 1154] - currently : -37.386° latitude, 270.864° longitude Wake turbulance [ID: 1086] - currently : -13.572° latitude, 15.156° longitude The Great Red Spot [ID: 1052] - currently : -20.25° latitude, 7.236° longitude HotSpot [ID: 1048] - currently : 5.22° latitude, 149.472° longitude Edge of Great Red Spot [ID: 172] - currently : -24.012° latitude, 1.8° longitude Lower Great Red Spot Atmospheric Flow [ID: 159] - currently : -26.1° latitude, 12.24° longitude Within the Wake of the Great Red Dot [ID: 156] - currently : -11.07° latitude, 7.236° longitude Small White Storm [ID: 154] - currently : 12.312° latitude, 104.832° longitude South Equatorial Belt [ID: 128] - currently : -8.568° latitude, 164.088° longitude Wake [ID: 122] - currently : -21.924° latitude, 23.508° longitude Oval BA [ID: 94] - currently : -29.862° latitude, 122.364° longitude String of Pearls [ID: 76] - currently : -37.8° latitude, 218.304° longitude White Spot Z [ID: 27] - currently : 37.8° latitude, 258.372° longitude String of pearl [ID: 26] - currently : -38.628° latitude, 231.66° longitude Sting of pearls [ID: 25] - currently : -38.628° latitude, 295.056° longitude String of pearl [ID: 24] - currently : -38.214° latitude, 88.596° longitude String of pearls [ID: 23] - currently : -38.214° latitude, 250.02° longitude String of pearl [ID: 20] - currently : -38.628° latitude, 346.788° longitude White spot [ID: 13] - currently : -29.034° latitude, 138.204° longitude spot turbulance [ID: 11] - currently : -13.572° latitude, 1.404° longitude
map : 2020-03-09 UT
Cylindrical map generated from data submitted via the JunoCam Planning section.

Points of Interest

POI suggestion has been disabled due to the orientation of Juno, Jupiter, and the Sun. POI based discussion of existing POIs is still open.
White Spots
41.49°, 324.936°
comments : 3
StormsOfSkylias
5.634°, 158.256°
comment : 1
The Eye of the White Whale.
6.894°, 55.224°
comments : 3

View All Points of Interest

Notes about cylindrical maps and perijove passes

In its 53-day orbit, Juno spends most of the time distant from Jupiter. The spacecraft swoops from the north to the south pole in just 2 hours, which we call a "perijove pass".  That means that the close-up images JunoCam can take are restricted to just a swath of longitude, not the entire globe.   JunoCam points out along the solar arrays, and for most perijove passes the solar arrays are oriented to the sun, so JunoCam is pointing 90 degrees from the sun.

As time goes on Juno’s orbit is moving around Jupiter.  The most distant point of the orbit is moving to Jupiter’s night side.  Perijove (“PJ”), the closest point in the orbit, is moving more to the sun-side, which impacts JunoCam because this moves Jupiter off to the side of our field of view.   A simple comparison of the images collected at PJ9 to PJ10 in the Processing gallery shows how the geometry is changing the shape of the images.

For those of you who have been participating since the beginning, we initially used this page to identify Points of Interest (POIs).  We would then vote on which POI’s to take pictures of on any given perijove pass.  This was a concept that we developed for Juno’s 14-day mission plan.   The decision to stay in a 53-day orbit means that the viewing geometry changes more and this impacts our ability to predict what will be in JunoCam’s field of view.   (To see the POI’s that were selected in the past you can go to the Voting page.)

General Comments

If you'd like to share commentary on Jupiter's atmosphere that is not related to a specific Point of Interest, please contribute below.

328 Comments

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  1. comment by MFrohawk on 2020-03-24 15:57 UT

    Hello everyone! This is my first comment/post on here, so please bear with me as my ADD can get the better part of my thoughts at times. It was recommended to me to post here after seeing results from a fluid dynamics project I am working on and share pictures of these observations.

    Quick backstory of why I am here: I have been performing some random fluid experiments using a "cobbled together" rheoscopic fluid in bottles with the intent of monitoring convection and rotation to find evidence demonstrating proof-of-concept of an idea I have– to share with those who study severe weather/mesocyclones. The point is to observe flow dynamics without atmospheric interference, a.k.a. condensation. One day I decided to record a little "fun" with exaggerated manipulation with the bucket I use to discard contents of some of these bottles. The video recordings were mesmerizing to watch– as the flow patterns constantly evolved and changed. A single input of rotation lasts 7-10 minutes. I have even been able to induce one specific condition- one that is seen as transverse rotating cirrus clouds observed with tropical systems and supercells.

    Now to get to the point. It was noticed that quite a number of these patterns are very close to many seen in the pictures taken by Juno of Jupiter's atmosphere. Perhaps further analysis of these patterns might help with understanding storm/rotation dynamics seen on Jupiter? I'd love to upload some of this video, but I cannot seem to do so without compression/losing the fine detail that shows what is happening (any advice would be greatly appreciated). So for now, here are some screenshots from some of those videos. I have edited the hue/saturation on some to highlight different features...and so that they don't all look the same.

    With that said, if this catches the attention of anyone, I will be more than happy to share everything.

    https://anonymousnamelss.imgur.com/all/

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    • comment by MFrohawk on 2020-03-24 16:04 UT
      comment removed.
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    • comment by MFrohawk on 2020-03-26 15:31 UT

      Apologies for the incorrect link to the images. Here is the correct one.

      https://imgur.com/user/AnonymousNamelss/posts

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  2. comment by Losonczrita-33 on 2020-03-22 14:53 UT

    Proposed friction will eventually light Jupiter as a sun!

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  3. comment by BrianSwift on 2020-03-02 23:49 UT

    I received the error message "Uh oh, we ran into some errors." when I tired sending the following message via the CONTACT form at the bottom of the web page using both Safari and Chrome on MacOS 10.14.6.

    ===

    Can someone there edit the description on one of my uploads.

    I'd like to change "548 Megapixel" to "168 Megapixel" in

    https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?id=8286

    If not, I'll delete an re-upload.

    Thanks

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  4. comment by Stankonyukhov-44 on 2019-10-08 19:40 UT

    Are the tools used by Mr. Eichstadt or Mr. Gill in processing the "striped" image (see discussion thread of 2018-08-21) available? If so, what are they called?

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    • comment by BrianSwift on 2019-11-02 06:46 UT

      Mr. Gill's raw/"striped" image processing tool is on Github at https://github.com/kmgill/cassini_processing . Additionally, performs image enhancements using Photoshop, and produces animations using Blender.

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    • comment by Maquet-80 on 2019-12-18 19:56 UT

      The tools I'm using for processing the raw JunoCam data are propriatary, and designed for internal use only.

      Gerald Eichstädt

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