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NASA's Juno Captures Jupiter Photo So Gorgeous You'll Swear It's Fake:
Jupiter is one of the most daunting planets in our Solar System, and thanks to the continually impressive work of Juno, NASA just shared a truly jaw-dropping photo. Considering most people won't ever get the chance to visit outer space for themselves, images from NASA and other organizations are extremely important. While it's difficult to convey the vastness of space in words alone, a picture from Perseverance, Hubble, or another instrument makes things much easier.
There are regular examples of this all the time. You could read an article about a massive aurora engulfing the Earth, but seeing a picture of its unfathomable beauty is that much more impactful. The same is true of all the Mars exploration happening right now. It's one thing to read about the planet having vast dunes and peculiar rocks, but to see actual pictures of these things is completely different. Whether it be for educational purposes or a passing interest, these photos are most people's gateway to the Milky Way and beyond.
NASA uploaded its latest space picture on November 10 and, simply put, it's so good you'll probably think it's fake. What you're looking at above is an image of Jupiter, as captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft and edited by scientist Brian Swift. The photo was originally taken on September 2 while Juno was 16,800 miles above Jupiter's gassy atmosphere. Juno's been orbiting Jupiter since July 2016 to do exactly this. It orbits the planet, regularly uses its 'JunoCam' to capture high-quality pictures, and is entirely solar-powered despite receiving 25x less sunlight compared to Earth. It's not the most talked-about spacecraft in Nasa's portfolio, but it really is one of the most impressive.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 15 2021, @10:35PM
All depends upon the filters installed. Normally you are correct in that science cams use the filters that will get at the science they are after, and when those filters don't correspond to the human eye response, they make false color images by assigning the different filters to the different R-G-B channels in the image. However in this case, I believe, the JUNOcam is a "public outreach" camera and it has the standard R-G-B filters you'd get on your cell phone camera, so (I believe) the images off of it are what you'd see. (JUNOcam also has a fourth filter optimized for methane gas detection, I'm assuming because they had an extra filter slot on the sensor and they added something for science purposes).
One of the best examples of this is the old Viking lander. If you want to make a picture of what the eye would see, but you have separate images taken in red, green, and blue filters, you need to scale the images according to the photopic response of the eye, where you'd make the green image brighter than the blue, etc. When Viking sent back its first pictures, they quickly made a color image by throwing the red, green, and blue channels in unscaled, and the resulting picture showed a blue sky [nasa.gov] because blue was over represented in the color composite. They fairly quickly scaled the colors properly showing a reddish-orange sky. HOWEVER, too late! The aliens-on-Mars crowd quickly realized that the sky there really is blue (because of life!) and this was the start of the evidence of the GREAT NASA/JPL COVERUP! (same crowd and same mission as the "Face on Mars", Cydonia Region, etc.)