Saturday, September 10, 2016

Eye of Jupiter

This is the eye of Jupiter, that giant red dot that always seems so mysterious. This was inspired by a picture posted by NASA recently, taken by Voyager 1 in 1979, in anticipation of the next spacecraft to investigate Jupiter, Juno. I thought that this was such a great example of science imitating art, so now here is my art imitating science.
Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, is 89,000 miles in diameter, big enough to swallow 1000 Earths. The vibrant bands of clouds are carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph, and continuously circle the planets atmosphere. These winds sustain spinning anticyclones like the Great Red Spot, a raging storm 3 1/2 times the size of Earth!
I have been fascinated by Jupiter ever since I was young, when my dad would show me pictures that he brought home from JPL, where he worked on many of these space probes, including Galileo, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Voyager 1, credited with taking my reference photo, is still transmitting information to this day, almost 40 later!

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