12 years after NASA launched its Juno mission to Jupiter, these are its most stunning images of the gas giant

• NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter and taking jaw-dropping photos since 2016.
• The most recent images capture Jupiter's cyclones, moons, and atmosphere in stunning detail.
• The mission is also helping scientists understand how other gas giants evolve.

NASA has been flying spacecraft by Jupiter since the '70s. But no spacecraft quite compares to Juno.

Juno is NASA's latest Jupiter mission, and it has shown us a completely new perspective of the giant planet.

Here are some of the most stunning images from the mission, so far, and how Juno has changed our understanding of Jupiter.

NASA's Juno mission has been orbiting Jupiter and snapping stunning photos for more than seven years.

The spacecraft launched more than 10 years ago, on August 5, 2011 and is the ninth NASA spacecraft to explore Jupiter.

As it sped towards Jupiter, Juno snapped a goodbye photo of Earth, proving that its cameras were ready for space.

Juno finally fell into orbit around the giant, gaseous planet in 2016, less than a year following the previous mission, Cassini.

Since launch, the probe has traveled more than 1 billion miles, and its JunoCam instrument has taken hundreds to thousands of photos.

Juno beams the raw data to Earth as black-and-white photo layers that represent red, blue, and green.

Then citizen scientists merge the layers and process them to make stunning, colorful portraits of Jupiter and its moons.

They enhance the colors to highlight different bands of Jupiter's atmosphere, storms, and clouds.

This enhanced image shows the complexity of Jupiter’s colors.

Juno's orbit takes it far from Jupiter, then swings it back towards the planet for close flybys.

During those flybys, the probe has flown over Jupiter's north pole, where eight storms rage around a giant, Earth-sized cyclone at the center.

The planet's south pole is no less stunning. Juno gave us the first close-up pictures ever taken of Jupiter's poles.

Juno even captured this eerie image of a “face” in Jupiter’s atmosphere, just before Halloween.

Seen together, the series of photos that Juno snaps during each flyby shows the spacecraft's journey.

The successive images show Juno zipping from one pole to the other in just a few hours, approaching Jupiter and then flying away.

But Juno's mission isn't about pretty pictures. It's looking for clues about how Jupiter formed and how it evolved.

That history can help scientists study the beginnings of our solar system and identify clues about Jupiter-like gas giants orbiting other stars.

Juno measured Jupiter's magnetic field for the first time, finding it far more powerful than scientists expected. Jupiter's magnetic field is 10 times more powerful than the strongest field on Earth.

A year after its arrival, Juno zipped past Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a raging storm near the planet's equator. It discovered that this cyclone goes 200 miles deep — that's 50 to 100 times as deep as Earth's oceans.

Cyclones spin in the same direction as the planet, but anticyclones spin in the opposite direction. Both are found all over Jupiter, in varying sizes.

Juno has also spotted the aurora ribboning across Jupiter's south pole. They’re like auroras on Earth, but hundreds of times more powerful and, unlike other planets' auroras, emit powerful X-rays.

The spacecraft captured the shadow of Jupiter's icy satellite Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.

Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt compiled Juno's imagery into a time-lapse video of its June flyby, which took the spacecraft past Jupiter and Ganymede.

During its 53rd close flyby of Jupiter, Juno captured the planet with its volcanically active moon, Io, floating in space.

Jupiter has 95 moons. In this dramatic image, the moon Io casts its shadow on the planet. If you could stand on Jupiter it would look like a full solar eclipse.

Juno was originally set for a fiery death in Jupiter's atmosphere in 2021, but NASA extended its mission through September 2025 so it could observe Ganymede, Io, and Europa more closely.

In the process, Juno is sure to beam back more photos of the largest planet in our solar system and its neighboring worlds.