This is an image of Uranus in false color.
Click on image for full size
NASA
Uranus Clouds, Overview
The
clouds of Uranus,
composed of methane crystals, are found very low in the troposphere, and are difficult to distinquish below the smog
haz
es of the planet's atmosphere. False color is used, in the image of Uranus to the right, to bring out the cloud pattern. In the image, the atmosphere displays a
pattern of concentric circles. This is because the ax
is of Uranus faces us, and the center of the image is the north pole of Uranus. The winds of Uranus blow clouds counterclockwise in the picture, as opposed to left to right as they would in an image of
Jupiter.
Because Uranus lies on its side, with the north pole facing the sun for a whole season, Uranus' meteorology should be very strange.
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The methane cloud deck of Uranus is found low in the troposphere. The methane clouds are the only clouds to be found on Uranus. The location of the clouds is predicted based upon the temperature at which
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Besides methane, Uranus' atmosphere contains more sophisticated atmospheric molecules such as ethane gas, acetylene, and diacetylene. All these molecules form layers of haze at different altitudes high
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The striped cloud bands on Uranus, like Jupiter, are divided into belts and zones. On Uranus the belts and zones are hard to distinquish. The left picture shows the north pole of Uranus. In this picture
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As a planet orbits the sun, if its rotation axis is tilted, the portion that is tilted toward the sun will receive an excess of sunlight and energy (summer), while the hemisphere which is tilted away
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In general, the weather on earth can be described in the following way: in response to incoming energy from the sun, the air rises at the equator and drifts to the poles where it is colder. Because Uranus
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The mesosphere of Uranus is a region of balance between warming and cooling. That essentially means that nothing happens there. Except for diffusion, the atmosphere is still. Upper reaches of the atmosphere,
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As on Earth, the atmosphere of Uranus consists of a troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere. The troposphere is the region where the visible clouds are to be found. The stratosphere, as
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