British backyard sky-watcher Jamie Cooper can add an impressive photo of Jupiter to his wide-ranging collection of space gems. The amateur astronomer snapped the beautiful image on Sunday outside his home in Whilton, England.
Cooper, 53, observed the spectacle using his Skywatcher 300PDS Newtonian telescope. “Jupiter is very well placed in UK skies over the next few months – a bright star-like object in the eastern skies easily seen with the naked eye,” he says in a statement, per South West News Service. “In the center of my image is the famous ‘Great Red Spot‘ – a huge anticyclonic storm that’s been raging for at least 200 years and is 10,000 miles in diameter.”
The iconic Great Red Spot is a giant storm bigger than Earth.
Fifth in line from the Sun, Jupiter is, by far, the largest planet in the solar system – more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined.
Jupiter’s familiar stripes and swirls are actually cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.
In July, Cooper shared a photograph of the International Space Station that he’d captured. Whilton is a village in the England county of Northamptonshire. It sits about 75 miles north of London.
Report by Dean Murray, South West News Service
