alienation news

The Great Dark Spot

"I was totally blown away when I saw it--a dark cloud twice as big as Earth swirling around Jupiter's north pole," says Bob West, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
West first saw it in an ultraviolet picture of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997. But it only appeared in one image out of many spanning a period of years.
"I didn't know what to make of it," he recalls. "The Great Dark Spot and the Great Red Spot are entirely different". The Great Red Spot is deep. "It's a high-pressure storm system rooted in Jupiter's troposphere far below the cloudtops. The Great Dark Spot is apparently shallow and confined to Jupiter's high stratosphere."