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This video has been making the social media rounds. The images are actual photographs taken recently by the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. But there is, as always, some image processing. As explained in an article at wired.com, thousands of individual images were mapped onto a spheroidal model of Jupiter, and then the model was animated and turned into a video. Note also that the colors and contrast are much more intense than the real Jupiter, but that is also arguably true of photos of the Earth from space. Juno is an interesting experiment in private image-processing. The Juno mission team has specifically left the process of image-enhancement open to citizens, amateur photo-analysts, or more loosely "the internet".

So is it real or not? Yes and no. That is also true of nearly every astronomical photo you have ever seen. A time-exposure of a galaxy or a nebula does not represent what the human eye would see at any range. It's interesting to ask 'what would Jupiter really look like if human eyes could see it from the vantage point of Juno?'. And yet human eyes could never do that. The radiation belts around Jupiter are so intense that a human being would die in just seconds unless wrapped in many meters of dense shielding --which would tend to spoil the view!

Frank Reed