For years astronomer William Hershel toiled away in complete obscurity, silently observing the heavens from his small observatory in rural England, until a completely unexpected event catapulted him to "rock star" status. While searching for comets one night in 1781 he found Uranus, becoming the first person to discover a planet in recorded history! It had previously been observed by others, but Herschel was the first to realize that it was a planet and not a star.
Uranus, the "seventh planet," is 20 times farther from the Sun than the Earth (3 "light hours"), and has an average brightness of magnitude 5.7, meaning that it is viewable with the naked eye under dark skies as a faint star. It appears as a small bluish disk in moderately sized amateur telescopes.
Uranus orbits the Sun every 84 years. It has 4 times the diameter of Earth, 63 times the volume, and 14 times the mass. It has 27 moons, the largest of which are Titania and Oberon which have diameters of about 1,000 miles (half that of our Moon). Titania and Oberon are clearly visible in this image. They are the star-like images to the upper left and lower right of Uranus. The small point just below the planet is a 15th magnitude star.
Uranus was in the constellation Aquarius when I took this image. The bright star in the lower right of the field is GSC 5813:593.
Unlike most of the other moons in the solar system, the moons of Uranus are named after characters in plays written by Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Oberon and Titania were a fairy king and queen in medieval lore, and are depicted in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.
Uranus
Date Taken:November 2, 2006
Location Taken: Conditions of Location:FWHM 2.7
Equipment Used:14.5" Ritchey-Chretien telescope, SBIG ST-10XME CCD camera, Astrodon RGB filters, TCC, PIR.
Processing Used:10x6 seconds LRGB, unguided, processed in Maxim DL and Photoshop (total exposure 60 seconds)
Distance from Location:2 billion miles
Constellation: Other Link: