Astronomers have produced a remarkable new image of Jupiter, tracing the glowing regions of warmth that lurk beneath the gas giant's cloud tops.

The picture was captured in infared by the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, and is one of the sharpest observations of the planet ever made from the ground.

To achieve the resolution, scientists used a technique called "lucky imaging" which scrubs out the blurring effect of looking through Earth's turbulent atmosphere.

This method involves acquiring multiple exposures of the target and only keeping those segments of an image where that turbulence is at a minimum.

When all the "lucky shots" are put together in a mosaic, a clarity emerges that's beyond just the single exposure.

Those are stunning images - so Jupiter is stripey - I wonder why - and what is the big red spot, seen more clearly in the second photo?

Don't think I will be going there for a holiday

Those are stunning images - so Jupiter is stripey - I wonder why - and what is the big red spot, seen more clearly in the second photo?

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a gigantic storm that's about twice as wide as Earth, circling the planet in its southern hemisphere. At the storm’s center, winds are relatively calm, but on its edges, wind speeds reach 270-425 mph (430-680 km/h). That's more than twice the speed of even the strongest hurricanes on Earth, which can generate wind speeds of up to 175 mph (281 km/h).

The storm is contained by an eastward-moving atmospheric band to its north and a westward-moving band to its south. Those swirling bands are also what formed the storm in the first place and have kept the storm spinning for more than a century.