True and false color views of Jupiter from Galileo show an equatorial 'hotspot' on Jupiter. The top mosaic combines the violet and near infrared continuum filter images to create an image similar to how Jupiter would appear to human eyes. Differences in coloration are due to the composition and abundances of trace chemicals in Jupiter's atmosphere.
Bluish clouds are high and thin, reddish clouds are low, and white clouds are high and thick.
The dark blue hotspot in the center is a hole in the deep cloud with an overlying thin haze. The light blue region to the left is covered by a very high haze layer. The multicolored region to the right has overlapping cloud layers of different heights. An explanation of how these deep holes in Jupiter's clouds could persist is reported in yesterday's edition of the journal Science by Dr. Adam Showman, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, and Dr. Timothy Dowling, director of the University of Louisville's Comparative Planetology Laboratory in Kentucky. Showman and Dowling propose that air moving west to east just north of Jupiter's equator is also moving dramatically up and down every few days.