Still from Planetwide Movie
This single frame from a color movie of Jupiter from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows what it would look like to unpeel the entire globe of Jupiter, stretch it out on a wall into the form of a rectangular map.
The image is a color cylindrical projection of the complete circumference of Jupiter, from 60 degrees south to 60 degrees north. It was produced from six images taken by Cassini's narrow-band camera on Oct. 31, 2000, in each of three filters: red, green and blue.
The smallest visible features at the equator are about 600 kilometers (about 370 miles) across. In a map of this type, the most extreme northern and southern latitudes are unnaturally stretched out.
Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.