Lots of activity recently at the North Equatorial Belt apparently, only after NH passed. Would be interesting to see what happens. Stay tuned.

http://jupiter.cstoneind.com/

It's incredible how amateur planetary photography has evolved in a couple of decades.

Compare the May 5th photo to this WFPC-1 image from 1991. The image is obviously poorly processed and scanned from a photo, but still...

Amazing... you can even make out surface details on Ganymede in the May 5th image.

May, 4 indeed. The most amazing picture quality is from the day before, however. I tried also to process it in order to obtain further details, but results were poor, demontrating that image processing is already optimized...

It is neither. It was overexposed, meaning that the center of the disk washed out. This image, a small portion of the WFPC field of view, is enlarged far beyond what it can sustain, but it isn't poorly processed besides that - it is just very noisy, because of processing to compensate for HST's bad optics.

Was it really that bad? The pre-service mission images, which are not many, are truly terrible. I can imagine the collective sigh of relief when the first images from the refurbished Hubble were received.



I wonder if the South Equatorial Belt is about to disappear again, as it is so pale now.

The overexposure issue was due to the fact that they hadn't gotten used to using the Hubble yet. They took images later on and got the exposure times right.

The latest Jupiter images by Go are magnificent--looks like the SEB is full-fade mode for the first time in a decade and a half. Just our luck that NH just missed it...(sigh).