Cloud shadows on Jupiter?, Voyager 1 images Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

When taking a look at some of the Voyager images of Jupiter I noticed something interesting in Voyager 1 image C1638201.IMQ - possible cloud shadows. I haven't seen them before on Jupiter in any spacecraft images. Here is a flat fielded, cleaned up and contrast stretched version of C1638201.IMQ:



At this time Voyager 1 was imaging equatorial and southern latitudes not far from the terminator which is to the right in this image. The possible cloud shadows are especially noticeable at lower right and near the image center. These features are more subtle but still noticeable without any contrast stretch or flat fielding:



C1638201.IMQ is a clear filter image obtained on 1979-03-05 06:08:36. The distance from Jupiter is 567,000 km according to the Jupiter Viewer at the PDS Planetary Rings Node. This yields a resolution of ~5 km/pixel.

There are more images obtained at a similar time that also seem to show shadows although this is the best example I have noticed so far.

If these are indeed cloud shadows (I can't see how this could be anything else) they must have been noticed before (they aren't that subtle) although I don't remember seeing cloud shadows mentioned before on Jupiter.

By the way the Voyager datasets for Jupiter are in my opinion still very interesting despite the Galileo and Cassini images. The resolution is much higher than in the Cassini images and there is far better time lapse stuff from Voyager than Galileo.

[scalbers]

Post #1 in this thread is pretty impressive in its showing of shadows from Voyager. The cloud near the upper boundary looks much like a convective overshooting top on Earth.

[JRehling]

I agree, Steve. It's interesting to think of the jovian equivalent of terrestrial weather patterns. Somewhere in that huge atmosphere, there may be cold fronts and/or low pressure centers triggering patterns of thunderstorms. I think we have yet to characterize it all, but these sure look like what you say.