The Great Red Spot is a persistent high-pressure region in the atmosphere of Jupiter, producing an anticyclonic storm, the largest in the Solar System, 22 degrees south of Jupiter's equator. It has been continuously observed since 1830.

A trio of NASA instruments – the Hubble Space Telescope, the ground-based Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and the Juno spacecraft that's orbiting Jupiter, teamed up to capture images of the mightiest storms in the solar system, taking place for more than 340 years. We can see bright infrared light coming from cloud-free areas, but where there are clouds, it's really dark in the infrared.

The new observations also confirm that dark spots on the planet's famous Great Red Spot are actually gaps in the cloud cover and not because of cloud color variations. In addition, the Juno spacecraft detected hundreds of lightning strikes around Jupiter's poles, which NASA said is the opposite of Earth, where lightning is most common around the equator.

Jupiter's constant storms are gigantic compared to those on Earth. Thunderhead clouds reach 40 miles from base to top – five times taller than typical thunderheads on Earth – and powerful lightning flashes up to three times more energetic than Earth's largest "superbolts," according to NASA.