It took hundreds of exposures and a complex method of removing occlusions, but this “lucky” shot is the result: a depiction of the hot regions lurking under Jupiter’s uppermost clouds.
The picture was captured in infared by the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, and is one of the sharpest observations of the planet ever made from the ground. To achieve the resolution, scientists used a technique called “lucky imaging” which scrubs out the blurring effect of looking through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. This method involves acquiring multiple exposures of the target and only keeping those segments of an image where that turbulence is at a minimum.