The process has led to a trove of stunning photos of Jupiter, unlike anything other space missions have ever produced. The detail is stunning. Zoomed in, Jupiter’s clouds look like cream swirling in coffee, or like the textured brushstrokes of a Van Gogh. They look like art.

NASA / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Seán Doran

Some of the amateur processors behind these pictures hang out on Unmanned Spaceflight, a no-frills internet forum where users can share and discuss spacecraft imagery. “It’s time to start a new topic for Juno’s Perijove-09,” wrote Gerald Eichstädt in a post on the forum last week. Eichstädt is a mathematician who works in software and lives in Stuttgart, Germany. Juno had recently completed its ninth flyby of Jupiter—a close approach known as a perijove—and Eichstädt was waiting for the pictures to show up online. Juno returns photos about every 53 days, thanks to an elongated orbit that brings the spacecraft toward the planet for a few hours before flinging it back out.

“More power to you Gerald,” wrote back Seán Doran, a designer in London. “Next week is going to be busy and fun!”

Doran wished his fellow image processor luck because translating data from Juno’s camera into something usable is no easy feat. JunoCam, as it’s called, doesn’t take pictures like the camera on a smartphone, or even like the camera on other spacecraft. It photographs in hundreds and hundreds of narrow strips through red, green, and blue filters—all while spinning around about every 30 seconds. These strips, called framelets, have to be arranged and stitched together to create coherent, composite photographs.

While Juno cruised to Jupiter, Eichstädt developed a computer program that automates this assembly, and he’s still tweaking it today. When a fresh batch of pictures becomes available, Eichstädt dumps the raw images into the program and lets it run. When that’s done, he shares the composite images with his fellow processors, and everyone jumps over to Photoshop to tinker with the images, produce their own takes, and create animations.

Their final photos, shared widely on social media, transform Jupiter from an abstract, distant planet into a dynamic world swirling with stormy weather. “You can see the clouds—that’s something we can wrap our minds around,” Doran said. “All of a sudden, the planet becomes real.”

The adjustments make the colors of Jupiter—all kinds of shades of orange and red and blue—pop. Without tinkering, Jupiter would look muted. For example, here’s a true-color version, from Björn Jónsson, a software engineer in Iceland who has also processed images from the Cassini, Galileo, and Voyager missions.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Björn Jónsson

Most processed photos are usually not “true color” images of Jupiter—but that’s not a bad thing.