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Stunning Nasa 'oil painting' image reveals raging storms on Jupiter with clouds that travel at 129,000mph and stretch for more than 4,000 miles

11:05, Sunday, 03 December, 2017
Stunning Nasa 'oil painting' image reveals raging storms on Jupiter with clouds that travel at 129,000mph and stretch for more than 4,000 miles

A stunning new Nasa image shows raging storms on Jupiter with clouds that stretch for thousands of miles.
     Swirling cloud formations seen over the gas giant planet's surface, one of which is more than 4,000 miles (6,500 km) long, resemble the brush strokes of an oil painting.
     Nasa's Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since 2016, captured the image while only 11,700 miles (19,000 km) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds — roughly the distance between New York City and Perth, Australia.

The colour-enhanced image, which shows a 15,000-mile (24,000 km) cloud system in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, was taken during the craft's ninth flyby on October 24.
     Juno was positioned at a latitude of 57.57 degrees - nearly three-fifths of the way from the gas giant planet’s equator to its north pole.
     'Because of the Juno-Jupiter-sun angle when the spacecraft captured this image, the higher-altitude clouds can be seen casting shadows on their surroundings,' Nasa said in a statement.
     'The behaviour is most easily observable in the whitest regions in the image, but also in a few isolated spots in both the bottom and right areas of the image.'
     Nasa shared several beautiful images of Jupiter last month taken during Juno's most recent flybys of the planet.
     One of the most breathtaking photos shows a 'string of pearls' – a series of eight massive rotating storms on Jupiter.
     The image, also taken on October 24, was snapped when Juno was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometres) above the tops of the clouds of the planet, which travel at about 129,000 mph (60 km/s).

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