Never before seen pictures of the solar planet Jupiter 

Jupiter and its images 

Jupiter is one planet whose iconic images have been seen by anybody and everybody but the new images that have come from James Webb Space say otherwise. 

James Webb Telescope 

The pictures taken from this telescope present a very different picture of Jupiter and throw a different light on it. The telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) used three filters F360M (red), F212N (yellow-green), and F150W2 (cyan) to create beautiful composites of Jupiter in never-seen-before angles.

The Great Red Spot 

The new technology also captured pictures of The Great Red Spot which is the iconic anticyclonic storm that appears on the southeast quadrant of Jupiter’s surface in a reddish color. 

All the new things 

Along with it, the new images also portrayed rings of the planet, two of its moons, auroras at both of its poles, and even tiny galaxies in the background.

The different portrayals 

The red filter is associated with the auroras that are brightest near the poles, the yellow-green filter with the whirling hazes and clouds on the visible surface, and the blue filter with the deeper clouds on the planet. The great amount of sunlight reflected by the whites denotes high-altitude regions. One of these brilliant white areas is the Great Red Spot. 

One image sums up the entire Jupiter 

“This one image sums up the science of our Jupiter system program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings, and its satellite system,” said Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory. 

“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said Imke De Pater, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley who has led the collaboration on James Webb’s images of the planet along with Fouchet.

The collab

Scientists used the raw data from the telescope that arrived at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STCI) to translate it into images that we can comprehend.