I'm curious to know the trajectory of the probe during the 25 hour time period during which these photos were taken.
Either:
a) The space craft had a polar orbit resulting in 1 revolution per hour (unlikely).
b) The space craft was relatively motionless (more unlikely).
Also, the clouds do seem peculiarly stable.
As to the original photos that I posted:
Were they digital photographs or analog? We've been transmitting images far longer than Nasa has been around.
On this pass it was leaving Earth for Jupiter in a slingshot move. It was moving away from the Earth.
The stability of the clouds is to be expected, as 2fst4u has stated, the clouds we see in the upper atmosphere are more stable than the ones we see flying by.
But if you think about it, it makes sense. How big are those clouds that seem to fly by fast? Most of them are pretty small, only a few thousand feet up, and some are even very transparent. Do you think you could see them in a low resolution image taking from at least several thousand miles up? Hell, you can't even see cities so what hope is there of seeing clouds that cover a small field?
I'll give the cloud explanation some credit, but that doesn't excuse the crappy photos at the beginning of this thread. Color broadcast technology had been around for quite a bit before that, so it's unlikely those photos would be so off color and grainy due to limited imaging technology.
Well you've got two factors to deal with.
The first is the imaging technology. They had limited space for everything. Then what they used had to use very little power and survive space for long periods of time.
The second issue is the on board computer. Today we take it for granted but back then computers couldn't process images quickly. If you took a 2Mpix camera image and asked an IMB 286 computer to load it, it would take a long time.
Doing a bit of research, I found the specs for the camera.
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/instruments/ssi.html800x800 pixels. That's what I'd expect to see from Galileo. The others had less.
Also remember that many space probes don't have color cameras. The reason being is that while color is nice, it doesn't add detail and it takes up 3x the space in the transmission.
Remember, a grey scale image is 255 tones from black to white. A color image is 255 tones of red, green, and blue.
And if you're going to be transmitting a signal millions of miles away, you don't want it to be huge files.
This is for the clementine probe:
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Clementine/nasaclem/sensors/uvvis/uvvis_table.htmlAs you can see, a pretty cheap little camera. But I assume it was designed to work for close range mapping at high image frame rates.