OPAL Grand Tour

From its vantage point high above Earth's atmosphere, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has completed this year's grand tour of the outer solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — returning crisp images that complement current and past observations from interplanetary spacecraft.

Hubble's snapshots of the outer planets reveal both extreme and subtle changes rapidly taking place in these distant worlds. Hubble’s sharp view gleans insights into the fascinating, dynamic weather patterns and seasons on these gas giants and allows astronomers to investigate the very similar—and very different—causes of their changing atmospheres.

About the colours

These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3 instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Several filters were used to sample medium wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter.

About the data

The HST observations include those from program 16266 (A. Simon)