Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Gliding past Jupiter at the turn of the millennium, the Cassini spacecraft captured this awe inspiring view of active Io with the largest gas giant as a backdrop, offering a stunning demonstration of the ruling planet's relative size . Although in the picture Io appears to be located just in front of the swirling Jovian clouds, Io hurtles around its orbit once every 42 hours at a distance of 420,000 kilometers or so from the center of Jupiter . That puts it nearly 350,000 kilometers above Jupiter's cloud tops , roughly equivalent to the distance between Earth and Moon . The Cassini spacecraft itself was about 10 million kilometers from Jupiter when recording the image data.
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