Great Red Spot of Jupiter as seen through the violet (404 nm) filter of the Galileo imaging system. The image is a mosaic of six images that have been map-projected to a uniform grid of latitude and longitude. North is at the top. The mosaic was taken over a 75 second interval beginning at universal time 4 hours, 18 minutes, 8 seconds on June 26, 1996. The Red Spot is 20,000 km long and has been followed by observers on Earth since the telescope was invented 300 years ago. It is a huge storm made visible by variations in the composition of the cloud particles. The Red Spot is not unique, but is simply the largest of a class of long-lived vortices, some of which are visible in the lower part of the image. The range is 1.76 million kilometers.
Galileo spacecraft imaging system and NASA/JPL-Caltech.
PIA00831: Mosaic of Jupiter's Great Red Spot (Violet Filter), url=<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00831">http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00831</a>.