Bruce Murray Space Image Library
Five Jovian days: The Voyager 2 Jupiter rotation movie
Between 20:34 hours (UTC) on May 27 and 22:34 hours (UTC) on May 29, Voyager 2 took 1,251 NAC frames, shuttered through a repeating sequence of orange, green, and violet filters. Only three didn't make it to Earth, but about 40 suffered significant data loss. This sequence covered five Jovian days. Unlike its sister craft, Voyager 2’s inbound trajectory was noticeably inclined to the Jovian equator; indeed, the sub-spacecraft latitude was approximately 8 degrees north. The phase angle, at nearly 38 degrees, is higher than Voyager 1’s perspective, so Jupiter appears in a gibbous phase. The movement of Jupiter in this video is a smoothed and averaged-out representation of the attitude of Voyager's scan platform as it took this sequence.
Learn more about this video in Ian Regan's blog entry.
Further details:
Start: May 27, 1979
Distance to Jupiter at start: 33.2 million km
End: May 29, 1979
Distance to Jupiter at end: 31.8 million km
Frames returned to Earth: 1,248 (out of 1,251 commanded)
Time interval between frames: 2 minutes, 24 seconds
Moon phenomena: Io (transit & occultation), Europa (occultation), Ganymede (near occultation).
Phase Angle: 37.7 deg