Hubble takes a series of giant outer planet family portraits

Every year, Hubble Space Telescope is pointed toward each of the four giant outer planets in our solar system — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — as part of a program to monitor their atmospheres.

All four rotate rapidly, in well under one Earth day*, so images are taken over the course of several hours to be able to create global maps of the planets, allowing planetary scientists to examine as much of the planets' atmospheric systems as possible. They're also done in as close to the same ...