NIGHT AND DAY

On 7 February 2018, Juno made its 11th close pass of Jupiter. This picture was taken when the spacecraft was climbing away from the planet’s south pole, and looking back at the mighty gas world. This particular shot was taken from an altitude of 120,533 kilometres when the spacecraft was almost directly over the planet’s south pole. The colour has been enhanced over what would be seen with the naked eye. The line separating the dayside of the planet from the nightside is called the ‘ terminator’. To capture details in this ‘ twilight zone’, when day is turning to night and vice-versa, the JunoCam instrument took a number of different images with different exposure times. The longer exposures showed the details of the twilight zone but overexposed the daylight side of the planet. The shorter exposures captured the bright hemisphere but failed to show anything near the terminator. Computer processing by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt then merged the two images.