Astronomy Department Research Project

OPAL

Planetary

Lead:
Michael H. Wong

Faculty:
Imke de Pater

Graduate Students:

Additional members:

Project Description

OPAL—the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program—maps each planet for two consecutive rotations, every year, using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on Hubble.

The main goal of OPAL is to observe each of the giant planets for long-duration time-domain studies of storm activity, wind field variability, and changes in aerosol distributions and colors. The data are being used with older Hubble and other spacecraft data sets to expand the time domain even further.

Project Photos

Project Videos

Hubble Captures New Maps of Jupiter