The picture below shows a southerly view of Jupiter. It was snapped by the Juno spacecraft earlier this year in a fly-by when Juno buzzed the orange-spotted planet at a distance of just 10,768 miles.

[NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstad/Sean Doran](http://NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstad/Sean Doran) The image clearly shows Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which is about 1.3 times as wide as Earth. The uniqueness of this photo, however, is due to its view. Prior to Juno’s arrival there in 2016, we were unable to get an image like this. The most interesting part of the story, though, is that this image was not created by NASA scientists. From DiscoverMagazine.com:

NASA/JPL/Björn Jónsson Credit goes to citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran. They started with several separate images from the spacecraft’s JunoCam, then they re-projected, blended, and healed them to produce this striking view. They were able to do this because all of the images from the Juno mission are posted online at a special Juno Cam website. From the website: This is where we will post raw images. We invite you to download them, do your own image processing, and we encourage you to upload your creations for us to enjoy and share. The types of image processing we’d love to see range from simply cropping an image to highlighting a particular atmospheric feature, as well as adding your own color enhancements, creating collages and adding advanced color reconstruction.

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Raw Image - NASA / SwRI / MSSS For those of you who have contributed – thank you! Your labors of love have illustrated articles about Juno, Jupiter and JunoCam. Your products show up in all sorts of places. I have used them to report to the scientific community. We are writing papers for scientific journals and using your contributions – always with appropriate attribution of course. Some creations are works of art and we are working out ways to showcase them as art. In addition, the scientists here are asking for help in planning which points of interest they should photograph next:

Processed Image - Karl Hutchinson “We’re calling all amateur astronomers to upload their telescopic images and data of Jupiter. These uploads are critical for providing context for new JunoCam images and will help NASA successfully plan the future of the mission.” So, if you’re an artist, amateur astronomer, or just want to try your hand at processing some of these raw images from Jupiter. Head on over the Jupiter Cam website and get started!