Gemini Gets Lucky and Takes a Deep Dive Into Jupiter’s Clouds
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This image showing the entire disk of Jupiter in infrared light (4.7 μm) was compiled from a mosaic of nine separate pointings observed by the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF’s NOIRLab on 29 May 2019. From a lucky imaging set of 38 exposures taken at each pointing, the research team selected the sharpest 10%, combining them to image one ninth of Jupiter's disk. Stacks of exposures at the nine pointings were then combined to make one clear, global view of the planet. Even though it only takes a few seconds for Gemini to create each image in a lucky imaging set, completing all 38 exposures in a set can take minutes — long enough for features to rotate noticeably across the disk. In order to compare and combine the images, they are first mapped to their actual latitude and longitude on Jupiter, using the limb, or edge of the disk, as a reference. Once the mosaics are compiled into a full disk, the final images are some of the highest-resolution infrared views of Jupiter ever taken from the ground. Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) and team Acknowledgments: Mahdi Zamani.
Researchers using the Gemini North Telescope, in combination with the Hubble Space Telescope and observations from the Juno probe at Jupiter itself, have collected some of the sharpest images of Jupiter ever obtained from the ground. Their observations revealed that dark spots in the famous Great Red Spot are actually gaps in the cloud cover and are not due to cloud color variations. Using a technique known as “lucky imaging”, the images also revealed that lightning strikes, and some of the largest storm systems that create them, are formed in and around large convective cells over deep clouds of water ice and liquid.
Read more in the Gemini Observatory press release here.
