The recent Great Red Spot (GRS) 'disruption' has been very interesting. Anticyclonic spots have been moving towards the GRS from the east, entering the red spot hollow and then moving around the GRS. This has sometimes managed to distort the apparent shape of the GRS. This is especially noticeable in methane band images (these images are indicative of cloud altitudes with bright areas in these images being high altitude clouds or hazes). Red blades/flakes also appear to separate from the GRS when this happens.
I took a look at the Cassini Jupiter images because I vaguely remembered seeing a distorted GRS shape in the Cassini MT3 images (the MT3 filter is centered at 889 nm, a very strong methane absorption band). I found an interesting image obtained on December 15, 2000. Here it is map-projected; notice the western end of the GRS:
Click to view attachmentComparing this to enhanced color images reveals that the bright 'lane' of material emanating from the western end of the GRS in the MT3 image has an orange color. Below is a blink comparison (an animated GIF) where an enhanced color image and the MT3 image are blinked. The color image is created from CB2, synthetic green and BL1 filtered images and has been contrast enhanced and processed to increase color differences.
Click to view attachmentA look at what happened leading up to this is interesting. Here is an animated GIF from seven MT3 images obtained between December 9 and 15, 2000. The images are not evenly spaced in time.
Click to view attachmentIt's interesting that the shape of the area of high altitude clouds/haze associated with the GRS does not stay constant.
Here is an animated GIF from a sequence of seven enhanced color images obtained at roughly the same times as the MT3 images. An anticyclonic spot can be seen entering the red spot hollow from the east:
Click to view attachmentConverting the enhanced color images to an animated GIF results in some loss of image quality since the GIF format only supports 256 colors per image or less. Here are the original map-projected frames I used to create the animated GIFs. They are of slightly higher quality:
Click to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentThese interactions between the GRS and the incoming spot are considerably more subtle in true color images than in the enhanced images above. Below are approximately true color images processed from the original image data:
Click to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachmentI think the events visible in these images are a 'miniature' version of what has been happening to the GRS recently. Red/orange material seems to be torn out of the GRS and the GRS shape gets distorted. The effects of this are not nearly as pronounced as what has been happening recently though.