Homemade Water Tornado

A few weeks ago my 8 year old had the homework assignment of making a homemade water tornado.  In theory, this is very simple and there are several step by step instructions on the web.  Here's just one of many example sites with instructions:

Make a Tornado in a Bottle

My daughter's instructions from school included food coloring to color the water, but the basic instructions were the same.  We constructed our water tornado and spun the bottle around to get the water rotating.  However, we didn't see a tornado.  The water was too cloudy for us to see to the middle.  Despite this failure we did see something very interesting.  The colored water, due to the dish soap, was very wavy, as seen in the video below.

It reminds me of the changing bands and storms in the outer atmosphere of Jupiter.  Maybe it was the red color of the water or the movement of the soapy material, but I immediately linked it to the surface of Jupiter.

This is a perfect example of science in action.  We didn't achieve what we set out to achieve, but by keeping our eyes open we still observed something very cool!