Mission Overview
Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL)
Primary Investigator: Amy Simon
HLSP Authors: Amy Simon
Released: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2023-08-30
Primary Reference(s): Simon et al. 2015
DOI: 10.17909/T9G593
Citations: See ADS Statistics
Source Data:
Overview
OPAL is a project to obtain long time baseline observations of the outer planets in order to understand their atmospheric dynamics and evolution as gas giants. The yearly observations from OPAL throughout the remainder of Hubble's operation will provide a legacy of time-domain images for use by planetary scientists. The project will ultimately observe all of the giant planets in the solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) in a wide range of filters. The images are processed using an ellipsoid limb-fitting technique, with an additional fringe correction applied to the narrow-band filters only (e.g., FQ889N for Jupiter 2014-2015), which amounts to a few percent correction. Mosaics are created for each observed filter in a projection that spans 360 degrees of longitude. See the README files (on disk or in the tables below) for additional details on the data processing. The mosaics from each filter (in FITS format), as well as previews (in TIF format) are provided.
Acknowledgements
Any publication that uses images or maps from the OPAL program should include the following statement in the Acknowledgments:
"This work used data acquired from the NASA/ESA HST Space Telescope, associated with OPAL program (PI: Simon, GO13937), and archived by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. All maps are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.17909/T9G593."
Data Products
The data files have the following naming convention:
hlsp_opal_hst_wfc3-uvis_<planet>-<rotation>_<filter>_v1_<type>.<ext>
where:
- <planet> = one of "jupiter", "saturn", "uranus", or "neptune"
- <rotation> = the rotation+epoch of the observation, in the format of <year><letter>, e.g., "2015a" is the first rotation of Jupiter from Cycle 22, and "2015b" is the second rotation from Cycle 22. Keep in mind that HST cycles span two calendar years since they start in Oct. and run through Sep. of the following year.
- <type> = Data product type, either "globalmap" for the science data product and full-size preview images, or "globalmap-medium" and "globalmap-small" for the smaller-sized preview images.
- <ext> = File extension, either "fits" for the science data products, "tif" for the preview images, or "png" for the web-friendly version of the preview images.
Data file types:
| _globalmap.fits | Mosaic (projection) for the given filter. |
| _globalmap.tif | Preview image (size varies by target). |
| _globalmap-medium.tif | Preview image (width x height ~ 900 x 450 px, varies by target). |
| _globalmap-small.tif | Preview image (width x height ~ 450 x 225 px, varies by target). |
| _globalmap-small.png | Web-friendly version of the small-sized preview image. |
Data Access
| Cycle (Year) | Jupiter | Saturn | Uranus | Neptune |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 (Oct 2014 - Sep 2015) | Jupiter Cycle 22 | N/A | Uranus Cycle 22 | Neptune Cycle 22 |
| 23 (Oct 2015 - Sep 2016) | Jupiter Cycle 23 | N/A | Uranus Cycle 23 | Neptune Cycle 23 |
| 24 (Oct 2016 - Sep 2017) | Jupiter Cycle 24 | N/A | Uranus Cycle 24 | Neptune Cycle 24 |
| 25 (Oct 2017 - Sep 2018) | Jupiter Cycle 25 | Saturn Cycle 25 | Uranus Cycle 25 | Neptune Cycle 25 |
| 26 (Oct 2018 - Sep 2019) | Jupiter Cycle 26 | Saturn Cycle 26 | Uranus Cycle 26 | Neptune Cycle 26 |
| 27 (Oct 2019 - Sep 2020) | Jupiter Cycle 27 | Saturn Cycle 27 | Uranus Cycle 27 | Neptune Cycle 27 |
| 28 (Oct 2020 - Sep 2021) | Jupiter Cycle 28 | Saturn Cycle 28 | Uranus Cycle 28 | Neptune Cycle 28 |
| 29 (Oct 2021 - Sep 2022) | Jupiter Cycle 29 | Saturn Cycle 29 | Uranus Cycle 29 | Neptune Cycle 29 |
| 30 (Oct 2022 - Sep 2023) | Uranus Cycle 30 |