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November 12, 2006
Jupiter Clouds in Motion in Google Earth
Google Earth lets you do whole planet image overlays, so you can turn Earth into other planets if you want (see below for other examples). A few days ago, Google Earth Community member 'barnabu' posted a time animation of the planet Jupiter taken by the NASA Cassini spacecraft in the year 2000 over a period of 24 Jovian rotations. The same side of Jupiter is shown in each frame so you see the motion of the clouds. The time animation is viewable in the new Google Earth 4 (v 4.0.2091 or greater). After loading the Jupiter animation 
(7.1 MBytes), you will see the time slider gadget in the upper part of the screen. First, turn off the Earth's atmosphere by using the menu "View->Atmosphere". You can either move the slider manually, or click on the triangular "Play" on the right side of the gadget. I recommend changing the speed of the animation by clicking on the clock gadget to the left and making the speed faster. The first time through you have to load all the images. After that it should animate quickly if you have a reasonable amount of graphics memory on your computer. The motion of the clouds are really cool, especially the great red spot. For fun, spin GE to while the animation is going. Amazing! See this NASA page for more details on the Jupiter images. Great work as usual 'barnabu'!
Related:
- Google Jupiter - this was a single image of Jupiter I overlayed in GE back in April
- Google Saturn - this uses a 3D model for the clouds, also done by 'barnabu'
- Mars Add-on for Google Earth
- Google Mars in Google Maps
- Space Atlas for Google Earth
Posted by FrankTaylor at November 12, 2006 04:39 PM
Comments
Posted by: Alex Panayi at September 18, 2007 10:53 AM
I did not know that. Thank you for that wonderfull piece of information.
Posted by: bob at October 2, 2007 10:02 AM
jupiter is not really big compared to the sun.but the sun is even extreme tiny in the galaxy.
Posted by: Eric at October 23, 2007 06:05 AM
This site is so usefull for school!
Posted by: steve at February 29, 2008 10:53 AM
This Is GRRRRREEEAT!
Posted by: Jeff at May 1, 2008 12:08 PM
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Jupiter is very big.