Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day Podcast. Today's Picture 4 April 21st of 2024 is titled Parajove 16, Passing Jupiter. So what do we see here? Here we're going to see about a one minute video we will watch showing the Juno spacecraft as it zips past Jupiter. So let's go ahead and take a look at this and what we'll see is that the Juno craft is in a highly elliptical orbit and that means it starts out very far away and spends most of its time well away from Jupiter but then it zips in very close and gives us very close up images of the clouds. Now it can take months for it to do this and that's because the orbit is what we say highly elliptical that means that it zips past the planet very fast. This is a consequence of Kepler's second law of motion and that says that the closer the object is the faster it's moving and when it's farther away it's going to move very slow. This is what happens to cometary orbits, comets orbit as very far away and then they spend most of their time out of the depths of the solar system and then whip through the inner solar system very fast. Now as we continue to watch the video we will see many of the cloud structures there on Jupiter including a lot of turbulence in the atmosphere. We will see the different colorations from the bluer color near the poles to the reds and browns near the equatorial regions and even some white areas. And as we go through that's helping us to learn more about the very complex atmosphere of Jupiter. Now Jupiter has this because it rotates very fast so a lot of the storms that we see on Earth gets stretched out and we see a lot of turbulence going around the planet. We do see some concentrated storms as well. One known is the Great Red Spot but we can also see a lot of other white oval scattered around Jupiter as well. Now you might wonder why do we not just keep Juno in a very close orbit and give it a chance to really study Jupiter up close. Now Jupiter has very strong radiation belts and very high levels of radiation that would damage the equipment if it was exposed to them for extended periods of time. So that's why this is set up. We can swoop in and look and only spend a short time in the high radiation zones and there's been most of our time well away from Jupiter where the radiation levels are much lower. So that gives us a chance to get that up close study that we see in our pictures today or our video I should say as well as allowing the craft to survive for a much longer time. Now Juno has been there since 2016 so it's been studying for 8 years now Jupiter and of course we'd love for this to continue for years to come. So that was our picture of the day for April 21st of 2024. It was titled Parajove 16 Passing Jupiter. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture. Previewed to be Volcano Emits Rings. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow and until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.