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The BBC news article Juno peers below Jupiter's clouds includes several very interesting images from the Juno spacecraft. The one below is a photo of Jupiter's faint ring.

The article says:

One very smart picture taken by Juno and released on Thursday showed the ring of dust that surrounds Jupiter. It is not well known that Jupiter has a ring, but it does. What was clever was getting the familiar stars of the Orion constellation to be in on the shot as well.

"This is the first image of Jupiter's ring that has ever been collected from the inside of it looking out," said mission scientist Heidi Becker from Nasa.

"Juno is 3,000 miles from the planet when we took this picture. So, what you're looking at is a ring of dust that's 40,000 miles away and stars that are hundreds of light-years away, all in the same picture."

Question: Is this the first photo of Jupiter's ring(s) from deep space? (Hubble doesn't count)

enter image description here

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It has been photographed before. See this image, from NASA/ Galileo. The difference with the Juno image is it was taken from inside of the orbit of the ring, while the Galileo was taken from further away from Jupiter than the ring.

enter image description here

In fact, it was Voyager 1 that first detected the ring system when it did a flyby of Jupiter. And it has been photographed by New Horizons as well. See Wikipedia for more, including more pictures.

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  • $\begingroup$ That's really beautiful! +1 for an aesthetically pleasing answer. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 25, 2017 at 23:12
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    $\begingroup$ I just realized there are two different spacecraft orbiting within the rings of two different planets right now. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 25, 2017 at 23:26

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