Jupiter's Little Red Spot – NASA's Juno captures this shot of gas giant’s swirling atmosphere (Pic inside)

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers.

New Delhi: NASA's Juno spacecraft has captured a stunning view of Jupiter’s northern latitudes featuring incredible detail of the gas giant’s swirling cloudtops.

The breathtaking view of the high north temperate latitudes fortuitously shows a giant storm known as NN-LRS-1, or the Little Red Spot (in the lower left in the image below).

The JunoCam imager on Juno spacecraft snapped this beautiful shot on December 11, 2016 at 8:47 a.m. PST (11:47 a.m. EST), as the spacecraft performed a close flyby of the gas giant planet.

This storm, the Little Red Spot, is the third largest anticyclonic reddish oval on the planet, which Earth-based observers have tracked for the last 23 years.

An anticyclone is a weather phenomenon with large-scale circulation of winds around a central region of high atmospheric pressure.

In the image, the Little Red Spot shows very little color, just a pale brown smudge in the center. The color is very similar to the surroundings, making it difficult to see as it blends in with the clouds nearby.

The image was processed by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstaedt and John Rogers, who also drafted the caption.