by MarkBour » Sun Aug 28, 2022 10:30 pm
For a long time, I have thought -- if Jupiter's surface is really clouds, then those cloud formations ought to swirl, and waft.
They certainly have the appearance of swirls, but always we only see what looks like a still snapshot, so we cannot see the wispy, undulating motion.
One problem is that the features we can see on grand Jupiter are so huge, that it would take a while to see them changing, in this manner that I think all clouds do. We aren't looking at puffs of merely 10-100 km in radius, rotating. The vortices we see on Jupiter are thousands of km in size. And even at good soft-cloud changing speed, it would take days or maybe even weeks for much change to happen.
So, how about a time-lapse? Here are a few images of Earth's clouds one day.
I can see the changes in the images. Even better, at the YouTube video animated from about 70 of them per day.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Another problem with Jupiter -- the planet itself rotates so rapidly that a cloud will go out of view a number of times before you can see much change. It forces us to see a strobed set of snapshots. Still, has anyone made a time-lapse that captured the great red spot in the same position for a good long sequence of rotations? If so, I think we could see the whirling dance of the clouds.
But it's not so easy to do. You couldn't get it easily from Earth, since our own motion is making consistent views difficult to amass. And an orbiter such as Juno is not in the position to keep a good record of this. But I suppose, if I looked at all of the photographic data from Juno, with a little work, it perhaps could be done.
I don't suppose anyone is planning to launch a satellite into a "junostationary" orbit (like Himawari-8 is to Earth, producing the images above). Or one at a Lagrange point for Jupiter (like DSCOVR for Earth), which is another convenient place to capture this.
For a long time, I have thought -- if Jupiter's surface is really clouds, then those cloud formations ought to swirl, and waft.
They certainly have the appearance of swirls, but always we only see what looks like a still snapshot, so we cannot see the wispy, undulating motion.
One problem is that the features we can see on grand Jupiter are so huge, that it would take a while to see them changing, in this manner that I think all clouds do. We aren't looking at puffs of merely 10-100 km in radius, rotating. The vortices we see on Jupiter are thousands of km in size. And even at good soft-cloud changing speed, it would take days or maybe even weeks for much change to happen.
So, how about a time-lapse? Here are a few images of Earth's clouds one day.
I can see the changes in the images. Even better, at the YouTube video animated from about 70 of them per day.
[float=left][attachment=0]Capture124.png[/attachment][/float]
[float=left][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccHBd4KhmhM[/youtube][/float]
Another problem with Jupiter -- the planet itself rotates so rapidly that a cloud will go out of view a number of times before you can see much change. It forces us to see a strobed set of snapshots. Still, has anyone made a time-lapse that captured the great red spot in the same position for a good long sequence of rotations? If so, I think we could see the whirling dance of the clouds.
But it's not so easy to do. You couldn't get it easily from Earth, since our own motion is making consistent views difficult to amass. And an orbiter such as Juno is not in the position to keep a good record of this. But I suppose, if I looked at all of the photographic data from Juno, with a little work, it perhaps could be done.
I don't suppose anyone is planning to launch a satellite into a "junostationary" orbit (like Himawari-8 is to Earth, producing the images above). Or one at a Lagrange point for Jupiter (like DSCOVR for Earth), which is another convenient place to capture this.