Voyager 1 Jupiter Images – Jupiter's limb at high resolution

This is a mosaic of two color frames. The color and contrast should be fairly accurate even though the source data consists of green and violet filtered images which is not optimal for producing highly accurate true color images. The images were obtained on March 5, 1979 when Voyager 1 was ~840,000 km from Jupiter's center. The resolution of the original images is ~8 km/pixel (slightly oversampled here). What's most interesting in this image is that just outside the limb, Jupiter's blue sky is clearly visible. It was somewhat difficult to align the original images (green and violet) accurately at the limb but this should be rather accurate. I got nearly identical results when I first aligned the images visually in Photoshop and when I later made another version where I aligned the images at the limb using color images of the Earth's limb as a guide (I compared the appearance of the Earth's limb in the red, green and blue channels and then compared this to the appearance of Jupiter's limb in green and violet light). In this image, the phase angle is relatively low (~19°). This means that sunlight illuminates Jupiter's cloudtops at a fairly low angle near the limb. This is one factor that contributes to the limb darkening and makes Jupiter's sky brighter relative to the limb than it would be at higher phase angles (i.e. less pronounced limb darkening).