Environment

I Can See Uranus.

by Jordan Yerman | August 24, 2007 at 08:05 am

1054 views | 10 Recommendations | 1 comment

... What'd you think I meant? Oh, please. Don't be so juvenile. To the right we have an image captured by NASAs Hubble telescope, depicting a side-on view of the distant planet's thirteen rings. Here's a link to a page explaining just how far apart our celestial neighbors are.

Hubble has snapped a gorgeous shot of the rings of Uranus.

The picture is extremely rare because the rings happen to be tilted perfectly edge on to Earth, an alignment that happens just twice every 894 years as the planet orbits the sun.

NASA points out that the last time the rings were aligned like this, no one actually knew the planet's rings existed.

A rare image of the ring system of the planet Uranus has been captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, using the onboard JPL-built and designed Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

In the image, the edge-on rings appear as spikes above and below the planet. The rings cannot be seen running fully across the face of the planet because the bright glare of the planet has been blocked out in the Hubble photo. A small amount of residual glare appears as a fan-shaped image artifact, along with an edge between the exposure for the inner and outer rings.

Uranus is the 7th planet from the sun. Its diameter, without the rings, is about 51,000 kilometers (32,000 miles) at the equator. Additional images and information on the Hubble Space Telescope is online at http://hubblesite.org/news/ . The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For those who want to pretend to be soaring through deep space, here's a live page tracking the current planetary positions within out cozy little solar system. Note Pluto's oddball orbit that brings it cloer to the sun than Neptune. But hey: today is all about Uranus.