We have been following the travels of the James Webb Space Telescope. The last time we checked on the instrument, it returned sensational images of deep space objects (e.g., nebulas and galaxies of interest).
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released spectacular images of an object closer to home: The gas giant Jupiter.
The James Webb Space Telescope took the photos in July, capturing unprecedented views of Jupiter’s northern and southern lights, and swirling polar haze. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, stands out brightly alongside countless smaller storms.One wide-field picture is particularly dramatic, showing the faint rings around the planet, as well as two tiny moons against a glittering background of galaxies.“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all quite incredible,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, of the University of California, Berkeley, who helped lead the observations.“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” she added in a statement.
Specialized filters helped produce the image.
The images were taken with the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which is capable of detecting light from the earliest stars and galaxies.JWST uses a broad range of infrared light to ‘see’ back in time, which is done by analyzing the time it takes for light to travel through space.And it used three specialized infrared filters to reveal Jupiter’s stunning details.Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but the light was mapped onto the visible spectrum, a range of wavelength we can see.One image, which shows Jupiter alone, is a composite of several images and shows the auroras blowing in bright orange, yellow and green above both the northern and southern poles of Jupiter.
Scientists are already gleaning a great deal of new information about the planet’s atmosphere with the new images. The less-than colorful images of the normally vibrant gas giant are due to pictures generated from the processed infrared data.
“The brightness here indicates high altitude — so the Great Red Spot has high-altitude hazes, as does the equatorial region,” said Heidi Hammel, Webb interdisciplinary scientist for solar system observations and vice president for science at AURA. “The numerous bright white ‘spots’ and ‘streaks’ are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms.”You might be wondering why the colors of the images are not what we’re used to seeing when it comes to Jupiter. Webb observes light in the infrared range, not the visible light range, so the colors of the two images are not the colors we observe with the naked eye. The infrared data has been mapped onto the visible light spectrum, so these images are “false-color,” not “true-color.”And that brings about an interesting point about how Webb actually works. When Webb “takes an image,” it’s not actually snapping a photo and beaming it down to Earth — scientists only receive raw data that indicates brightness as measured by Webb’s receptors. As such, scientists must process that data to create the images.Typically that’s done by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is headquartered in Baltimore. But in the case of this pair of Jovian images, the data was processed by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt of Modesto, California. (For the wide-field image, she collaborated with Ricardo Hueso, a co-investigator on the observations from the University of the Basque Country in Spain.)
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