“Are we seeing the ‘beginning of the end’? The GRS Death dance?” one astronomer wondered aloud in a Facebook group for Jupiter enthusiasts. “I was scared because if the Great Red Spot disappears … it’s like you go to New York and remove the Statue of Liberty,” another told me.

Read: Why is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot shrinking?

As it has shrunk, the storm has also grown darker, redder, and taller; this year, the color palette is more intense than ever, according to a NASA press release accompanying new photos of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Through all those changes, though, the spot’s position has never shifted: Twin jet streams circle the planet in opposite directions and lock the storm in place. Moving at speeds approaching 400 miles an hour, the jets constantly bombard the spot with clouds and vortices; some incorporate themselves into its body, while others pass through unhindered. The whole system looks something like a wristwatch wrapped around the planet, with the jet streams for a band and the spot for a face.

In the months after they first recognized the spot’s unusual behavior, the amateurs around the world monitored it at virtually all hours of the day and sent their images to the scientists at NASA’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program. The storm looked to have undergone a sudden contraction (though more recent amateur data suggest it has since returned to its former size). But when the scientists analyzed its behavior using the amateur images along with the higher-resolution Hubble photos, they arrived at a very different story.

The Great Red Spot was not dying—at least not any faster than it had been before. To the amateurs, it had looked as though strands of the storm were tearing away. But according to Amy Simon, who leads the Outer Planet program, that impression resulted from the fundamental imprecision of visual measurements.

Recently, Simon told me, the program has started measuring the storm using its dynamics instead of its visual features. Tracking the storm’s velocity rather than its color revealed that much of the red gas that had seemed to be flowing out of the Great Red Spot was actually flowing in. This, she said, is nothing new.

“It’s always doing this,” Simon told me. The Great Red Spot “is always pulling stuff in and parts of it are flying off. That is not unusual at all.” The difference this time, she said, has to do with both the appearance and the behavior of those mysterious red flakes.

For starters, the material flowing into and around the red spot has taken on a reddish color more like the storm’s, creating the illusion of shedding. Simon told me that shift in color occurs before the material ever reaches the storm, while Glenn Orton, a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thinks the shift happens later.