ON THE SPOT

If you were to compose a list of the seven wonders of the Solar System, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot would be near the top. This gigantic storm system is bigger than planet Earth, and rotates in an anticlockwise fashion with a period of about six days. Although a large circular storm has been reported on Jupiter from the 1660s onwards, it may not be the one we see today. Records are poor between 1713 and 1831 and may indicate that the original storm dissipated, and that the Great Red Spot we see today ‘only’ formed in the 19th Century. This image is an artistic endeavour based on real data. Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt used data from the JunoCam instrument and enhanced the colour to draw the eye into the storm. The raw image was taken on 10 July 2017, during Juno’s 7th close flyby of the planet. When the image was taken, the craft kilometre ft was about 10,000s above the planet’s cloud tops.