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To observe with Hubble, we actually 
have to plan out pretty far in advance.  

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And for the outer planets, what we do is we 
pick the time when they're at opposition,  

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and that means that it's opposite from 
the sun, from the earth's point of view,  

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and that basically gives us the 
highest resolution view. That's when  

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Hubble is the closest to each planet, even 
though that doesn't vary much over a year.  

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And the planets are a little bit more challenging 
because they move, and so Hubble has to find guide  

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stars first, that tell it where it's pointing in 
the sky. But then it has to track those planets,  

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so it has to move following the planet across 
the sky. And so that has to be interleaved with  

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all the other science program Hubble's doing every 
single day, and so it's very carefully coordinated  

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to fit in, as Hubble then orbits around the 
Earth. And so it gets planned out down to  

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the minutes of exactly which image we're going to 
take, in which filter, for each of those planets.

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So it's a cosmic dance of getting 
Hubble pointed in the right place,  

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moving in the right direction, 
and tracking all at the same time.

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The OPAL project, or the Outer Planet's 
Atmosphere's Legacy program, is an observational  

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program using the Hubble Space Telescope. And what 
we're doing is, we're looking at each of the outer  

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planets every year, so that we can build up a 
time base, using the exact same facility and the  

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same instruments, so we can actually track what's 
changing over the years on each of those planets.

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It started, really, with Jupiter. In essence, we 
were trying to look at the weather on Jupiter.  

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And as we're trying to understand weather, we 
know, even here on Earth, it changes every minute,  

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every hour, every day. And we didn't 
have that kind of time coverage.  

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But we also didn't even have longtime coverage 
to look at things that changed over seasons. And  

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so we had this big gap in our knowledge, where 
we just weren't getting frequent enough data  

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to be able to trend any of these things. And 
the idea kind of came about to look at a legacy  

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program, where we built up a legacy for Hubble 
within the planetary community. And in 2014,  

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we started with our first observations of Uranus. 
And the first thing I think we noticed was Uranus  

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had a very prominent polar cap. It was very 
much brighter, and getting brighter over time.  

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We've watched it over the last few years get 
much brighter. Neptune, on the other hand,  

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has been really quite interesting. The first 
thing we noted was it had a lot of bright  

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white clouds and they were coming and going 
pretty rapidly at a lot of different latitudes.

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And so, when we start looking 
at Neptune and Uranus,  

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as dynamic planets with changing atmosphere, 
weather -- like we know now for Jupiter  

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and Saturn -- we realize that we have 
a lot of gaps in our understanding.

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And so, we've been able to use the OPAL program 
to track how much cloud cover we have from  

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year-to-year. But the other thing we can do with 
Hubble, that we can't really do any other way,  

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is look for dark spots. And so the Great Dark Spot 
was this big iconic feature we saw with Voyager.  

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And when we looked again a few years later, 
finally, when Hubble was online, it was gone.  

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And that kind of surprised us, because we were 
used to the Great Red Spot, which doesn't go away.  

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It's changed over time, but it's still there. 
And so, these storms are not quite the same  

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as what we see on Jupiter, because they form 
and go away on much more rapid time scales.  

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The latest image of Neptune is really interesting 
to me, because we don't see those bright white  

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clouds we've been seeing the last few years. As 
a matter of fact, the only thing we see in that  

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particular image is this Great Dark Spot. And so, 
in a lot of ways, it brings us around full circle,  

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because this looks so much like the Voyager image 
from 1989. And that was pretty surprising to me,  

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not to see as much cloud activity as 
we've been seeing in previous years.  

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The OPAL team is actually a fairly small 
team, there's only three of us. But our data  

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is immediately available to the public and any 
other scientist that wants to use them. And so,  

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we do that, as well as our own scientific 
analysis. Having so much Hubble data now,  

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there's just so much in there to study. And you 
know, as a scientist, that's what drives us,  

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is trying to solve mysteries, trying to look for 
new mysteries. And so, having these long-term data  

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sets, with just such rich numbers of features in 
there, there's always something to go look at. And  

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it's certainly going to keep us busy for years to 
come, even when we're not getting any more data.