I don’t think there is an astronomer who doesn’t love a pretty high resolution image of …well… pretty much anything in space. Give me a crisp clear galaxy, or a nebula, or even a quiet frost field on another planet and I will happily stare at the pretty picture. But science… the coolest science sometimes comes from the gnarliest looking images.   Back in May and October 2023, the Juno spacecraft flew near Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io and pointed its infrared camera and Io to see what it could see… and what it saw was lava lakes that appear hottest around the edges.  The data isn’t pretty,...

read more