Voyager 1 Jupiter Images – Great Red Spot mosaic

This is a 4x3 mosaic of individual color images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Each individual color image was created from raw orange and violet images. I also created synthetic green images because no green images were obtained during this particular imaging sequence. Processing the raw images involved reprojecting them to simple cylindrical projection, mosaicking them and then rendering the cylindrical mosaic on an ellipsoid using a typical viewing geometry (there is no such thing as a 'correct viewing geometry' because the images were obtained over a 37 minute period with Jupiter rotating). I then fixed the color balance. The final step was to sharpen the resulting image a bit, mainly to compensate for all of the resampling that the previous processing steps required. This mosaic reveals lots of small scale details, for example features that seem to be vertical relief and cloud shadows are visible at various locations, especially southeast of Great Red Spot. The 24 individual images I used were obtained by Voyager 1 on March 4, 1979 at a distance of about 1.85 million km. The first image (C1635314) was obtained at 07:08:36 and the last one (C1635400) at 07:45:24. The resolution is roughly 18 km/pixel. Mosaics of some of these images have appeared before as 'official' image releases but interestingly, only 3x2 images were used in all cases.