Voyager 2 view of Jupiter

Filed under best of, global views, amateur image processing, Jupiter, Voyager 1 and 2

Go Back

Here is a Voyager 2 view of Jupiter that hasn't been seen before. The original data consists of eighteen images, nine each captured through orange and violet filters by Voyager 2 as it approached the greatest planet on June 30, 1979.

NASA / JPL / color mosaic by Björn Jónsson

Jupiter mosaics are notoriously difficult to assemble because of the complicated motions of cloud features and the fast rotation of the planet. To produce this view, Jonsson reprojected each image in 3D space to align them, and had to do additional processing near the terminator to account for the way features rotated into daylight through the nearly half an hour that it took for Voyager 2 to acquire all 18 frames. To create a three-color composite from only two filters' worth of images, he calculated weighted averages of orange and violet images to create synthetic red, green, and blue channels. (In specific: G=(0.71*O + 0.29*V) * 1.11285; color balance of O, G, V channels adjusted to make bright zones white; then R=1.1*O-0.1*V and B=0.25*G+0.75*V.) The white oval below and to the left of the Red Spot is Oval DE, one of three white spots at that latitude that later merged to become Oval BA, also known as Red Junior.

Copyright holder: Björn Jónsson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about June 30, 1979