The image above looks like an example of abstract art, but this is no painting.

Key points: The photo was taken from NASA's Juno spacecraft as it passed the gas giant

The photo was taken from NASA's Juno spacecraft as it passed the gas giant A software engineer enhanced the raw image, highlighting Jupiter's 'dramatic' atmosphere

A software engineer enhanced the raw image, highlighting Jupiter's 'dramatic' atmosphere NASA's Junocam allows the public to take images from the spacecraft using their own processing techniques

It is actually a photograph of the cloudy skies over Jupiter, taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 18th flyby of the solar system giant.

A colossal storm can be seen sweeping across the planet, with the clouds resembling swirls of paint.

The picture is a photograph taken from space which has been enhanced by Kevin M Gill, a NASA software engineer who has developed an online following for his stunning space images.

This particular image was posted to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Photojournal webpage in late February, with the space agency blog praising Mr Gill for capturing the "dramatic atmospheric features" in Jupiter's northern hemisphere.

It has since been shared across the internet, drawing comparisons to the work of Vincent Van Gogh.

When asked about the creative side of his work, Mr Gill was reluctant to view himself in the same light as a great painter.

"I don't really consider myself an artist," he said.

"I rely a lot on the art inherent to nature.

"[But] I have had works featured in art galleries and what I do takes a bit of an artistic eye, I guess …"

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How do you create a space masterpiece from data?

Mr Gill's image was taken on February 12, 2019, when Juno was about 13,000 kilometres above the Jupiter's cloud tops.

It was created using NASA's Junocam imager, a publicly available resource where astrophotography buffs can view data from the Juno mission.

This online tool demonstrates where Mr Gill sourced the solar system shot before enhancing it.

NASA's plan was to have members of the public to "fill in key pieces of Junocam operation". ( NASA / SwRI / MSSS )

Juno snaps the pictures of Jupiter, but the sensors are set up as stripes on the camera, so the red, green, blue, and Methane pixels are all in separate parts.

This gives the raw images a "weird striped, jagged look", but Mr Gill has developed a process that refines this by fixing up the raw data and enhancing the colour.

"[This process] translates the colour values in the data from what the camera encoded them as for transmission to Earth to a proper RGB value and applies some weights to each colour channel to account for the specific sensitivity of the colours on the sensor," he said.

"Then it goes and pulls out the stripes, reprojects them onto map and reassembles them back together all aligned."

A few more tweaks, some 3D modelling and a bit of creative problem solving produces spectacular results.

Jupiter's Western Great Red Spot makes for a striking subject. ( NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill )

It's a process that probably takes less time than it would take to set up an easel and mix up the right paint colours.

"I've automated much of my JunoCam processing so it's actually pretty quick — maybe ten or fifteen minutes," Mr Gill said.

"I've tried to make most of my imagery work quick to process.

"With a fulltime job and kids, I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to it."

Mr Gill is a software engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles, US, referring to himself as a "data wrangler".

But his work on the Juno images has been purely on a hobby level, with NASA referring to him as a "citizen scientist" in the Photojournal blog.

Mr Gill nicknamed this image of Jupiter after Mr Hankey, a character from South Park. ( NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill )

He has a general fascination for all planets and moons, but some planets appeal to him more than others.

"I guess I like the gas giants," he said.

"Saturn and Jupiter hold a particular fascination for me, each for their own unique qualities.

"I guess I wish I could be there to see them in person."

Mr Gill publishes his work on Flickr and posts videos of visualisations on his YouTube channel.

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NASA calls for creativity

The Junocam tool was launched with the hope that keen space enthusiasts would help render images taken from the spacecraft.

"With a very small professional operations team, and together with the professional community involved in active observations of Jupiter, we are relying on the public to fill in key pieces of Junocam operation," a 2014 NASA report said.

"The public is an essential part of our virtual team.

"Some possible areas of effort are feature tracking, visualizations using other Juno instrument data and/or ground-based observations, methane mapping, and false colour.

"While basic processing will be done by image processing professionals, we will primarily be encouraging the general public to be creative."