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With the help of a technique known as “lucky imaging,” researchers have used the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to capture some of the highest-resolution images of Jupiter ever obtained from the ground. Combined with optical and radio observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Juno spacecraft, the images reveal new information about the formation of Jupiter’s major storms and the planet’s famous Great Red Spot, according to the Gemini Observatory.
“Lucky image” involves taking a large number of short-exposure images, and only keeping the photos sharper.
“From a set of lucky images from 38 exposures taken at each point, the research team selected the 10% sharpest, combining them to obtain a ninth image of Jupiter’s disk,” the observatory explained in a press release. “The stacks of exposures at the nine points were combined to obtain a clear and comprehensive view of the planet.”
International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley)
The technique allowed the team to obtain “ultrafine Gemini infrared images” of the planet, the observatory said.
“These images rival the view from space,” said Michael Wong of UC Berkeley, who led the research team, in the statement.
The Gemini North Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) can cut through the thin haze caused by Jupiter’s storms, but its images are still obscured by thick clouds in the planet’s atmosphere. That created a “jack-o-lantern” effect, in which “the warm, deep layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere shine through gaps in the planet’s thick cloud layer,” the press release said.
“You see bright infrared light coming from cloud-free areas, but where there are clouds, it’s very dark in the infrared,” said Wong.
In the past three years, researchers have used images of Jupiter by Gemini and Hubble to understand Jupiter’s wind patterns, atmospheric waves, and cyclones.
The information gathered also helped researchers confirm that the spots in the Great Red Spot that seemed dark to Hubble are actually gaps in cloud cover, and not variations in cloud color, as previously believed.
NASA, ESA and M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) and team
Scientists also studied Jupiter’s “gigantic” storms, which include vertical clouds called thunderheads that are 40 miles long from base to top, five times higher than typical thunderheads on Earth, according to nasa
The Gemini data gave researchers a look at the deep-sea clouds, providing “another tool to estimate the amount of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” NASA said. “This is important in understanding how Jupiter and the other gaseous and ice giants were formed, and therefore how the solar system as a whole was formed.”
The Hubble and Gemini images in support of the Juno mission are also helping scientists study many other weather phenomena such as “changes in wind patterns, characteristics of atmospheric waves and the circulation of various gases in the atmosphere,” he said. The NASA.
