Extreme storms on Uranus are causing plenty of excitement among amateur and professional astronomers. The typically uneventful face of Uranus has become quite stormy, with large cloud systems that provide details visible to amateur astronomers for the first time.

Professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, Imke de Pater, said in a statement, “The weather on Uranus is incredibly active.” Pater is also the leader of the team that initially noticed the stormy activity when using adaptive optics to view Uranus from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The astronomers viewed eight large storms on the planet’s northern hemisphere from the observatory deck on August 5 and 6. This included the brightest storm ever seen on Uranus, producing 2.2 microns with pressures nearly half those at the Earth’s surface. The storm produced a total of 30 percent of all light reflected by Uranus at this wavelength.

The study’s co-investigator, Heidi Hammel, from the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, explained, “This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus’s once-every-42-year equinox occurred and the sun shined directly on the equator.” Hammel continued, “But we predicted that such activity would have died down by now. Why we see these incredible storms now is beyond anybody’s guess.”

After hearing of the planet’s storm activity, amateur astronomers were able to see a bright spot on the planet’s surface, which is typically an unremarkable blue dot.

According to nineplanets.org, Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and the third largest in diameter.