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Image credit: M. Showalter/Stanford/STScI
These are two copies of an image of Uranus taken on June 5, 2004 with the F814W filter on the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) of the Hubble space telescope. The image has been contrast-enhanced to make the bands and other features on Uranus easier to see. The south pole is to the left. The bright region over the south pole is known as the South Polar Cap and the particularly bright ring at the northern edge of the Cap is the Polar Collar. Just north of the Polar Collar is a bright spot elongated in the east-west direction (arrow in right-hand frame). This spot (GS-37S) has now been observed over a period of nearly one year. It is the first such feature on Uranus that we can be sure has lasted so long.
Several fainter spots are also visible in the northern hemisphere. Similar spots have been seen at roughly the same latitudes in the past, but there is no way to know how long they lasted, or when they may have disappeared while new spots formed.