An amateur astronomer used an old technique to study Jupiter — and found something strange

A tan, gaseious Jupiter hangs in black space, layered like a cross section of geological survey, a swirling red storm at its lower left.

Scientists and amateur astronomers have teamed up to upend a long-held assumption that Jupiter's iconic swirling clouds are made of frozen ammonia — a pretty foundational revelation about the gas giant we thought we knew well.

Using commercially available telescopes and spectral filters, an amateur astronomer named Steve Hill collected data to map the abundance of ammonia in Jupiter's atmosphere, but Hill ultimately found something that contradicted previous models of the gas giant's atmospheric composition to begin with.