Fact Sheet
Seeing Spots
Giant storm clouds and thin rings highlight these infrared images of the planet Uranus obtained last year with one of the giant Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Astronomers used special equipment attached to the telescope to overcome the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, providing the clearest images to date of details below the top of Uranus' atmosphere. The white spots are big storm systems, some of which are whipping around the planet at almost 500 miles per hour. The red bands around the planet are Uranus' dark rings, which may consist of a single layer of particles (though some of the particles could be as big as houses). Uranus is tilted on its side as it orbits the Sun, so its poles are near the left and right edges of the planet, not the top and bottom. [Credit: Lawrence Sromovsky, Univ. Wisconsin-Madison/Keck Observatory]
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