Comments

  1. rq says

    Mars was better, but this one also has pendant potential. Does he have Saturn as well? Quite the collection. Mars was a lot more organic, like a fish eye or frog egg, Jupiter looks more formalized, even though intuitively I feel it should be the opposite, being a gas giant and all…

  2. Kreator says

    To me this looks like a cross section of some alien being’s circulatory system, as seen through a dirty microscope.

  3. StevoR says

    Classic old artwork sketch.Great hand drawn snapshot of a world of bottomless storms merely”from chill clouds to scalding, near sunlike intensity at its still mysterious core and that has a volume of one thousand, three hundred and twenty one Earths but a mass merely three hundred and eighteen times Earth’s. Interestingly the Great Red Spot has shrunk in recent times :

    http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/observing-news/jupiters-great-red-spot/

    Plus the planet itself is actually shrinking by 2 centimeters a year (presumably an earth year) :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter#Mass_and_size

    Oh & we have a robot spacecraft -- Juno -- orbiting and studying Jove now with its most recent closest approach to Jove occurring on the 24th October but the results and success and info from that still unclear due to the respective positions (conjunction) of Jupiter, our daytime star and us. See :

    https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/juno-scientists-prepare-for-seventh-science-pass-of-jupiter

    Including a rather magnificent Monet-like artwork from Juno by Citizen scientist David Englund.

    Incidentally, the general public has actually been able to vote online to select Juno imaging targets although whether the camera has survived the radiation enough to still enable this from now I don’t know.

    ***
    “To get a sense of the scale of the Jovian system, consider that if the Earth was placed at the centre of Jupiter, our Moon would lie inside the orbit of Io, while distant Sinope would be a third of way to Mars. Jupiter’s magnetosphere, the wasp-shaped zone within which its magnetic field takes precedence over the charged particles constituting the solar wind, extends more than seven million miles ahead of the planet in the direction of its orbital motion, where it stacks up against the solar wind at what is called the magnetopause, and trails so far behind that it sometimes impinges upon Saturn. Were it visible to the eye, it would loom four times the size of the full Moon in our skies here on Earth. Auroras larger than the surface of Earth dance near Jupiter’s poles, where its magnetic field lines converge. Gigantic lightning storms stitch the upper atmosphere. Meteors plunge the Jovian atmosphere at a rate that makes Earth’s 400 tons per day look paltry, and in the course of its long tenure Jupiter has ingested millions of comets.”
    -- P. 186, Ferris, ‘Seeing in the Dark’, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

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