When I got the newest issue of Icarus I was surprised that the cover featured photos of Uranus. I'm quite fond of Uranus and happy whenever I see it get any attention. (By the way, I am aware of every double entendre in this post. I can mock and love this planet at the same time.)

The cover photo was related to an article by Larry Sromovsky and 16 coauthors about "Episodic bright and dark spots on Uranus." I've written before about how these bright storms in Uranus' northern midlatitudes have made the formerly bland-looking world a much more exciting planet to study. Cloud activity was observed in 1999, 2004, and 2005, but not since -- until late last year.

New cloud activity flared up in July 2011, but was not noticed until October. There were actually two different bright storms located very close in latitude (at 23 and 25 degrees north) but having quite different drift rates. One moved west at 9.2 degrees per day, the other at 1.4 degrees per day. Extrapolating the drift rates, the astronomers predicted that the two storms would have a close encounter on December 25, 2011.

They activated a Hubble Target of Opportunity proposal to get images before, during, and after that predicted event (on December 20, 25, and 29). But instead of a storm encounter, they found something quite different: the original spot had faded, but the second spot was found to have a companion dark spot. We've seen lots of dark spots on Neptune, but this was only the second ever observed on Uranus.

At this point, I asked myself: I wonder if those images are available? Hubble data is funny. Sometimes there are long proprietary periods, sometimes not. A bit of searching led me to Proposal ID 12463, which featured 32 photos targeted at Uranus on those three dates through different filters. And hot diggity dog, the data was not proprietary. Even better, among the filters that they used were the ones necessary to make approximate true-color filters. I sent an email to Ted Stryk, and the next day he sent me processed versions: Uranus as seen by Hubble WFC3 on December 25, 2011.