For years, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has used its ultraviolet-observing capabilities to capture images of the intense blue auroras that light up the atmosphere at the poles of Jupiter. Emitting light in UV and X-ray wavelengths, the phenomena — which look like bright spiral galaxies at the planet’s crown and base — are not visible to the human eye. They have, however, inspired the human imagination.
Visual designer Hannah Lee, who works on the team behind ChromeOS’s annually released new wallpapers and screensavers, first came across Hubble’s UV images of the planet while reading a NASA article in 2023 and digging further to investigate the auroras. Around the same time, she was testing our AI image-generation tools and had just finished a documentary about UV photography.
“It was happenstance that these things all came at the same time,” Hannah says. “But it got me thinking, ‘I wonder if I can use AI to visualize the auroras to help bring this concept to life?’’”
Turns out you can. ChromeOS recently released four new wallpapers and a screensaver based on NASA’s photos and 3D renderings of Jupiter’s auroras exclusively for Chromebook Plus machines. The wallpapers show the auroras as they appear during the planet’s day, night, sunset and sunrise, and change automatically to reflect the local time where you are (on Earth). In the animated screensaver, we see shadows sweeping over the rotating planet, stars panning across the black expanse behind and flame-like auroras dancing at its southern pole.
