The clouds on the outer planets look very different from the what we see here on Earth, but then at other times they look more familiar than anyone might expect. I will talk about the general morphology of Jupiter’s atmosphere, its distinct banding and wind patterns, and of course the Great Red Spot. The discoveries from the Juno mission and the circumpolar cyclones at Jupiter’s poles provide the opportunity to look at the other outer planets that all have polar storms of varying sizes. We will look at Saturn’s Hexagon, the recent north pole of Uranus coming into view, and large dark spots on Neptune.

I’m originally from Buffalo NY and went to undergrad at SUNY Buffalo for Electrical Engineering and Engineering Physics, after which I worked for several years as a green building consultant working for a small firm that collaborated with architects on historical renovations and new buildings. Still loving astronomy and after a ski trip to Colorado, decided to change career paths and went back to school for astronomy at CU Boulder and then moving to New Mexico Tech, right next to the VLA to eventually earn my PhD in Physics. My PhD focused on modeling jet streams in atmosphere and what we could learn from observatories like Hubble and IRTF about waves and turbulence from cloud structure. I went to NASA Goddard for my postdoc where I continued studies of Jupiter’s atmosphere,including the Great Red Spot and smaller spots and storms, and also worked on the OSIRIS-REx mission as an instrument scientist for a spectrometer which aided in finding the sample site for asteroid Bennu. I am now working in the instrument division at STScI on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the calibration reference file pipeline.