Hi everybody, I'm Steve Levin, and this is my special assistant Shane Levin.
And we're going to color pictures of Jupiter today.
If you want to color along, you can find the links to the pictures in the description underneath
the video down below.
Okay so there's a picture of Jupiter that we got.
And that's Jupiter the way it looks... kind of the way it looks as you see it from the
Earth.
It's got the great red spot right there in the middle, so I'm going to color that in
first and color it red.
What is the great red spot?
The great red spot is a storm, and it's a storm bigger than the whole Earth.
In fact, I'm going to get a blue... here's a blue.
Is there a better blue?
Here's a blue.
And I'm going to color the Earth right here, even though the Earth is really super far
away from Jupiter I'm coloring it right there as if it was right next to it.
I'm just making a blue dot to remind us just how big the great red spot is.
And that storm didn't always look like this either, you know?
What did it used to look like?
So it used to be quite a bit rounder than or quite a bit more elongated than this.
Not this round.
So it used to be stretched out and wider.
It used to be as wide as almost three times as wide as the Earth.
Maybe even wider if you look far enough back.
We've known about it for hundreds of years, but of course the pictures are better now
than they used to be.
Juno's taking great pictures.
I'm the project scientist for Juno.
It's a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter.
Jupiter's my favorite planet and not just because of the spacecraft, but also because
it's super big.
So there's my Jupiter coming along.
Jupiter is so big you can fit more than a thousand Earths inside it.
And because it's so big it tells us a lot about the whole solar system and how the planets
formed and all that stuff by learning more about Jupiter.
But we had to send our spacecraft to get close to Jupiter because from the Earth all you
see is these clouds up at the top of the atmosphere.
These belts and zones are jet streams, clouds moving in both directions and everything.
We can see the great red spot shrinking or at least getting not quite so wide.
But we didn't know very much about what the north and south poles of Jupiter looked like.
Until Juno got there.
And now we have pictures of the north and south poles.
This is the south pole, and I'm going to start by coloring it in with a whole lot of blue.
Let's find a better blue.
With a whole lot of blue because the poles of Jupiter turn out to be a lot bluer than
the rest of the planet.
Do you know why?
Not really.
It's probably chemistry... different chemicals are different colors and all.
We're seeing Jupiter's atmosphere still when you look at it with your eyes or with a camera
that shows visible light you're just seeing what chemicals are in the atmosphere.
That's what makes the color, but we don't really know yet exactly which colors, or which
chemicals, make all the colors.
And I exaggerated, it's not really quite this blue.
But it's more fun that way.
And my colors are going to be closer than yours because you like to follow the rules
even less than I do.
Yeah, I like my Jupiter to be a little bit rainbow I think.
Well that's cool, rainbows are fun.
And I'm going to color the circumpolar cyclones.
I'm making them purple.
They are totally not purple, but I'm doing that anyway.
Circumpolar cyclones?
Storms.
Storms as big as the whole U.S. Centered... there's one at the center of the south pole,
and there are five around it in a ring.
And if you go to the north pole of Jupiter, the pictures we have there show one at the
center of the north pole, but there's eight of them around it, circled around it.
And these here, the five that we're looking at...
Our spacecraft's been at Jupiter for almost four years now, and they've been pretty much
in the same pattern the whole time.
We come by every 53 days, so we get a picture, a good picture, every 53
days, and then we spend a long time with the spacecraft far away from Jupiter.
Then we do it again.
Only one of those pictures showed anything different.
It showed a sixth one that kind of forced its way in, and then in the next picture it
was pretty much gone.
That's really cool.
We don't really know exactly why they're so stable, why the five cyclones stay there and
why do they last so long and why does the great red spot last so long.
That's some of the things we're trying to learn about Jupiter with our spacecraft.
But in the meantime it makes a really good picture, even if you do color them purple
when they shouldn't be purple.
Alright.
I'm the one who colored them purple.
Yours are closer.
Oh okay.
So there's Jupiter from the side the way you see it from the Earth, and there's Jupiter
from the south pole from below where you can see it from Juno.
You want to show yours?
Yeah, mine are a little less scientifically accurate.
But more fun.
So thinks for coloring with us today.
I hope everybody goes to the web page and does your own coloring too.
Thanks, bye.