Great Dark Spot
The Great Dark Spot (also known as GDS-89) is the name given to a series of dark spots on Neptune similar in appearance to Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The first one was observed in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 probe. Like Jupiter's spot, they are anticyclonic storms. However, the interiors of Great Dark Spots are relatively cloud-free, and unlike Jupiter's spot, which has lasted for hundreds of years, their lifetimes appear to be much shorter, forming and dissipating once every few years or so. Based on observations taken by Voyager and since then with the Hubble Space Telescope, Neptune appears to spend somewhat more than half its time with a Great Dark Spot. Almost all that is known about Neptune is based on the research carried out by the spacecraft Voyager 2.
Read more about Great Dark Spot: Characteristics, Disappearance
Famous quotes containing the words dark and/or spot:
“Light silence, dark speech.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)