This is the image captured by Voyager, I like to use really good images to compare my work with. Image credits Nasa
Discovered first in 1781 by William Herschel and is the seventh planet in our solar system. It’s a gas giant that has one of the coldest planetary atmospheres in our solar system with a minimum temp of 49 K (−224.2 °C). Uranus has a very featureless look, but in reality the cloud structure is more, for starters it’s layered. The low clouds are thought to be water and the top layer contains methane. The planet has an interior part that is rock and ice In contrast, the interior of Uranus is mainly composed of ices and rock.
A few pretty interesting features about this planet is like Venus it rotates opposite of the majority of the planets by rotating east to west. Uranus also has a really interesting feature, it axis is tilted almost parallel to its orbital plane, so it looks like it’s spinning on it’s side like rolling around the orbit. There is speculation that the extreme tilt is because of a collision with an object that could be as big as a planet. This situation may be the result of a collision with a planet-sized body early in the planet’s history, which apparently radically changed Uranus’ rotation. Because of Uranus’ unusual orientation, the planet experiences extreme variations in sunlight during each 20-year-long season. The orbit of Uranus is 84 earth years, and because of it’s extreme tilt one quarter of it’s year puts one pole in sun lite and the other pole is in a long dark winter.
Normally a planet’s magnetic field is pretty much in line with it’s axis This pane’s is not, it’s tipped over nearly 60 degrees fro the axis of rotation. Just when you think it can’t get any weirder it is offset from the center by 1/3rd the planet’s radius.
Everyone can see a picture and clearly know it’s Saturn because of it’s rings, but Saturn isn’t the only planet to have rings. Uranus has two sets as well. There inner set has nine rings which are predominately dark, they were discovered in 1977. When Voyager 2 flew by they found two additional inner rings. An outer ring system was discovered by Hubble in 2003. It’s fascinating to know we can still make discoveries in this day and age.
Uranus has 27 known moons, named for characters from the works of William Shakespeare or Alexander Pope.
For some reason when I looked at it I thought it was goign to be brownish. .. I’m not sure why at all. but instead it was blue, much more soft than Neptune. Planets get their color from what they are made of – their composition, and Uranus is made mostly of hydrogen, helium and methane. Methane is what gives Uranus its blue color.
I took this photo of Uranus with only a 6″ Celestron Schmitt Cass telescope.
Unfortunately I couldn’t see the rings, but considering I don’t have the budget of NASA. . .I get what I can afford. If memory and my notes serve me right It was a pretty clear night, I do miss Nevada’s skies. It wasn’t too hard to pick out in the eyepiece, however the planet looks more like a faint star when seeing it with my own eyes. The camera is much much more sensitive.
To collect this image I took several videos with the Orion StarShoot Deep Space Video Camera II, and I took roughly 20 seconds of video. For this image I used the zoom function to get a closer view, otherwise it would have just looked smaller. I processed the footage in Registax version 6 and edited it in Photoshop to clean it up and remove artifacts. This one was a pretty straight forward method of processing. I got the video and ran it through it, the key to remember when using Registax is to set the limits with the smallest Lollipops when on the set limit phase.
There was just something pretty about the color, much like when you see a shade or a hue and never see it any where else. it was just calm and peaceful instead of in your face bold. I really enjoyed seeing it. . .fascinating to think of the distance.
Data
Discovered By
William Herschel
Date of Discovery
13 March 1781
Orbit Size Around Sun (semi-major axis)
Metric: 2,870,658,186 km
English: 1,783,744,300 miles
Scientific Notation: 2.8706582 x 109 km (1.9189165 x 101 A.U.)
By Comparison: 19.189 x Earth
Perihelion (closest)
Metric: 2,734,998,229 km
English: 1,699,449,110 miles
Scientific Notation: 2.73500 x 109 km (1.828 x 101 A.U.)
By Comparison: 18.593 x Earth
Aphelion (farthest)
Metric: 3,006,318,143 km
English: 1,868,039,489 miles
Scientific Notation: 3.00632 x 109 km (2.010 x 101 A.U.)
Six Alberts Astronomy & Astrophotography 