>>>>>Animation of pictures of Jupiter taken by Voyager 1:
>>>>>
>>>>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:790106-0203_Voyager_58M_to_31M_reduced.gif>>>>
>>>>Plan for any other lifetime: understand why some belts rotate this way while the others rotate opposite to them.
>>>
>>>Don't you get the same effect with terrestrial weather systems ?
>>
>>I guess we're missing some metallic hydrogen here... We get the swirls, but I don't remember seeing stripes parallel to equator going in opposite directions to each other.
>
>Could just be because the Earth doesn't tend to have dense cloud cover close the the equator. The movement in the two hemispheres is definitely in opposite directions. An extended time-lapse version of this would probably show it more clearly:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/satellite/There goes another lifetime... I wish there was a simple explanation for this, for us non-physicists (even though physics was my 2nd subject), in terms of high-school fluid mechanics. If it requires a PhD in the field to understand, I'd be perfectly happy with a bit longer animation with maybe twice the frame rate.