A distant world 75 light years from Earth is probably a nice enough place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. OK, you probably wouldn’t even want to visit there. That’s what astronomers have concluded after observing “weather” on an exoplanet for the first time.

Unfortunately, the world in question has dust storms. One might take solace from the fact that there’s also rain on the planet, but alas the rain drops are made of molten iron. Space tourists are advised to bring sturdy umbrellas. There’s also the pesky matter of surface temperatures, which exceed 800 degrees Celsius. And for bikini-clad vacationers hoping to catch some rays in between the clouds, sorry, there actually is no star.

PSO J318.5-22—the technical name of this Jupiter-sized world—is a rogue planet. And while it may not be an ideal vacation world, for astronomers the discovery of even miserable weather on a distant planet is nonetheless a big deal. Until now they’ve not been able to study weather patterns on planets outside of the solar system.

Using telescopes in Chile, astronomers were able to take hundreds of images of the world in the infrared, which allowed them to precisely measure changes in brightness. This was only possible because PSO J318.5-22 does not have a nearby star to wash out its emissions. This allowed the scientists to tease out what they believe to be varying layers of cloud cover. They published their results in The Astrophysical Journal.

Now that they’ve used their technique on low-hanging fruit such as a large rogue planet, the astronomers hope to refine their approach to measure changes in smaller, cooler planets, as well as those that actually do orbit stars.

"This discovery shows just how ubiquitous clouds are in planets and planet-like objects,” said Beth Biller, the University of Edinburgh astronomer who led the study. “We're working on extending this technique to giant planets around young stars, and eventually we hope to detect weather in Earth-like exoplanets that may harbor life."

Hopefully they'll find worlds other than ones the size of Jupiter with the amenities of Venus.

Astrophysical Journal, 2015. DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/813/2/L23