Large Brown Oval, Jupiter's cloud
author: Nasa/JPL/Novapix
reference: a-jup04-00021
Image Size 300 DPI: 11 * 10 cm
This large brown oval, photographed on March 2 1979 by Voyager 1, may be an opening in the upper cloud deck which could provide information about deeper, warmer cloud levels. Features of this sort are not rare on Jupiter and have an average lifetime of one to two years. Above the feature is the pale orange North Temperate Belt, bounded on the south by the high speed North Temperate Current with winds of 120 meters/sec (260 mi/hr). The range to Jupiter at the time this photograph was obtained was 4.0 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) with the smallest resolvable features being 75 kilometers (45 miles) wide.