Hubble image archive
Neptune's Mysterious Shrinking Storm
This series of Hubble Space Telescope images taken over 2 years tracks the demise of a giant dark vortex on the planet Neptune. The oval-shaped spot has shrunk from 3,100 miles across its long axis to 2,300 miles across, over the Hubble observation period. Immense dark storms on...
- Date
- Jan 1, 2018
- Mission
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Archive ID
- hubblesite-images-2018-08-4118-image
This series of Hubble Space Telescope images taken over 2 years tracks the demise of a giant dark vortex on the planet Neptune. The oval-shaped spot has shrunk from 3,100 miles across its long axis to 2,300 miles across, over the Hubble observation period. Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then only Hubble has tracked these elusive features that play a game of peek-a-boo over the years. Hubble found two dark storms that appeared in the mid-1990s and then vanished. This latest storm was first seen in 2015. The first images of the dark vortex are from the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, a long-term Hubble project that annually captures global maps of our solar system's four outer planets.
Credits
NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong and A.I. Hsu (UC Berkeley)Image Details
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | Neptune |
| Object Description | Planet |
| Distance | The semi-major axis of Neptune's orbit about the Sun is 30.06 astronomical units (roughly 2.8 billion miles or 4.5 billion kilometers). |
| Dimensions | Neptune has a diameter of roughly 30,800 miles (49,600 kilometers) at the equator. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description | The HST observations include those from programs , , , (A. Simon), and (M. Wong). |
| Instrument | WFC3/UVIS |
| Exposure Dates | 18 September 2015, 16 May and 03 October 2016, and 06 October 2017 |
| Filters | F467M, F547M, F763M |
| About The Image | |
| Color Info | These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3/UVIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Several filters were used to sample narrow wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F467M Green: F547M Red: F763M |
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Source
Image and source material are credited to the official mission archive linked below.
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