NASA Just Released 1,300 Images of Jupiter From the Juno Probe

Impact

NASA just released about 1,300 raw images from the Juno spacecraft's approach to Jupiter, and anyone can download and use them.

When you first open the photos, they look like really, really long strips of black nothingness. It's easy to miss Jupiter which appears as a series of teeny-tiny specks. Get ready to scroll for a while.

NASA

But if you zoom way in, you'll see Jupiter captured in multiple frames:

NASA

The images turned out this way because of how Juno's camera is designed

Each still image "is a long strip composed of 82 frames, with each frame measuring 128 pixels tall," according to NASA. They're made of layered red, green and blue spectral bands. The frames are stacked on top of each other in each image. That's why the photos look like the strips you get from a photo booth at the mall.

NASA used the still images to stitch together a video of Juno's approach:

The video begins "June 12 with Juno 10 million miles from Jupiter, and ends on June 29, 3 million miles distant," according to NASA.

We should see the first close-up images from Juno's orbit around the planet in late August, according to NASA

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