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People see all kinds of things when they look up at puffy white clouds in the sky — angels, puppies, Elvis Presley.
So of course a new photo from NASA of the “magnificent, swirling clouds” around Jupiter has inspired a cosmic guessing game.
What do you see in these clouds?
A dragon’s eye? The Virgin Mary? A squid? A “moonlit swimmer”?
Twitter user Tom Smith sees “a woman being comforted by an angel under the moon.”
The color-enhanced image was taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft “at 1:58 p.m. PDT on Oct. 29, 2018 (4:58 p.m. EDT) as the spacecraft performed its 16th close flyby of Jupiter,” according to a NASA press release.
The space agency described them as “a multitude of magnificent, swirling clouds in Jupiter’s dynamic North North Temperate Belt … Appearing in the scene are several bright-white ‘pop-up”’clouds as well as an anticyclonic storm, known as a white oval.
“At the time, Juno was about 4,400 miles (7,000 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees north.”
NASA says that “citizen scientists” Gerald Eichstadt and Sean Doran created the image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. Doran, according to CNET, “is well known for his work in processing those images into vivid visual feasts.”
Doran tweeted four images of the cloud formation with this declaration: “A dolphin swims in Jupiter’s sky.”
“We’ve seen some unlikely marine-inspired shapes out there in space, like a fishy rock on Mars and a pair of galaxies that look like a penguin with an egg. Now we can add a Jupiter dolphin to the list,” wrote CNET.
Another image Eichstadt and Doran created from the spacecraft’s JunoCam reminded many people of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting, Space.com reported last year.
The image captured “swirling cloud belts and tumultuous vortices within Jupiter’s northern hemisphere,” NASA wrote on its website.
It took Juno five years to reach Jupiter after NASA launched the spacecraft on Aug. 5, 2011, reports Fox News, which says the mission of collecting data about the planet will come to an end in 2021.
Raw images from JunoCam, NASA says, can be seen on its Mission Juno website.
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