Jovian storms of surpassing beauty

In April, a visible-light image (left) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope showed that a new giant storm (red arrows) in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere was about 62,000 kilometers away from the planet’s centuries-old Great Red Spot storm (white arrows).

A near-infrared image (right) taken July 13 at the Gemini North Observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea reveals that the oval storms are now separated by only 3,000 km, as the smaller, faster-moving spot brushes past the larger one.