As it approached Jupiter from June 12 to 29, JunoCam captured an animation of the major moons orbiting the planet, covering 17 days -- one complete Callisto orbital period. The mission released a processed version of the animation on the day of orbit insertion, but took a few weeks to release the raw image data. With a little help from Gerald Eichstädt (who produced thumbnails) I've now assembled one of my usual thumbnail previews of the entire data set. JunoCam should have restarted imaging after Jupiter orbit insertion on July 11, and should be acquiring another movie now, the "Marble Movie," on approach to its August 27 perijove. I've seen only one image formally released so far from that sequence, but TODAY the mission posted nearly 900 Megabytes of raw data from the Marble Movie on the JunoCam processing website -- stay tuned for more from that!

Although I'm happy that amateurs get to work on the JunoCam data, I don't recommend this data set for beginners. If you've never tried playing with spacecraft image data before, begin with Curiosity or Cassini or Opportunity. But even if you don't intend to actually work with the data, you might enjoy some reading on what makes this data set particularly challenging.

A quick reminder on JunoCam's peculiarities:

The camera is mounted on the side of a spinning spacecraft.

It uses spacecraft spin to build up long image swaths. Raw images can be as many as 1648 pixels wide by 31488 pixels tall.

Its field of view is very wide-angle: across-swath field of view is 58 degrees, and it can take 360-degree image swaths over one complete spacecraft spin.

It is a "pushframe" imager, so each image is made of numerous skinny framelets that need to be puzzle-pieced together to make a coherent picture. The framelets overlap, so it's not as simple as just tiling them next to each other.

A raw RGB color image has alternating red, green, and blue framelets, as many as 82 of each in a single long 360-degree image swath.

What does all this mean? Consider this image. If you click on the link, you'll get to an extremely long, skinny noodle that looks almost entirely black. It represents a 360-degree view around the spacecraft. They took the entire 360 degrees because during the approach, there wasn't a good way to inform JunoCam where Juno was in its spin phase, so to be certain of imaging Jupiter, they had to capture the entire swath around the spacecraft. Scroll to the bottom of the photo and you'll find what looks like (and is) multiple images of Jupiter. Here's a crop: