Jupiter's Great Red Spot: Photos of the Solar System's Biggest Storm

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Jupiter and the Great Red Spot

NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)

Jupiter's trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling anticyclonic storm feature larger than Earth — has shrunken to the smallest size ever measured. Astronomers have followed this downsizing since the 1930s. Image released May 15, 2014. [See full story.]

Jupiter's Great Red Spot (1995, WFPC2)

NASA, ESA, and R. Beebe (New Mexico State University)

Jupiter's Great Red Spot seen in 1995. Image released May 15, 2014. [See full story.]

Jupiter's Great Red Spot (2009, WFC3/UVIS)

NASA, ESA, and H. Hammel (Space Science Institute and AURA)

Jupiter's Great Red Spot in 2009. Image released May 15, 2014. [See full story.]

Jupiter's Great Red Spot (2014, WFC3/UVIS)

NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)

Jupiter's Great Red Spot in 2014. Image released May 15, 2014. [See full story.]

Compass and Scale Image for Jupiter Great Red Spot

NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

Compass and scale image for Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Image released May 15, 2014. [See full story.]

Jupiter's Tasty Great Red Spot

Cakecrumbs

Jupiter's "Great Red Spot" first attracted cake-maker Rhiannon to the challenge of creating this planetary layer cake. Image uploaded on Aug. 27, 2013.

Jupiter's Little Red Spot: Best Color

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This amazing color portrait of Jupiter’s “Little Red Spot” (LRS) combines high-resolution images from the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken at 03:12 UT on February 27, 2007, with color images taken nearly simultaneously by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Little Red Spot is the second largest storm on Jupiter, roughly 70% the size of the Earth, and it started turning red in late-2005. The clouds in the Little Red Spot rotate counterclockwise, or in the anticyclonic direction, because it is a high-pressure region. In that sense, the Little Red Spot is the opposite of a hurricane on Earth, which is a low-pressure region – and, of course, the Little Red Spot is far larger than any hurricane on Earth.

Great Red Spot

NASA/ESA/A. Simon-Miller (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Another stunning close-up view of Jupiter's trademark storm.

Secrets of Jupiter's Great Red Spot Revealed in New Weather Map

ESO/NASA/JPL/ESA/L. Fletcher

Thermal images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The image on the left was obtained with the VISIR on the VLT in Chile on 18 May 2008. The image on the right was obtained by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 15 May 2008.

JunoCam Red Spot Four

NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin Gill

This enhanced-color image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot was created by citizen scientist Kevin Gill using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA's Juno spacecraft.

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Space.com Staff
Space.com Staff
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