the-science-llama:

Uranus

ohmysagan:

You can zoom in on this here. Uranus is Herschel and Neptune is Leverrier and that makes me smile.

(Source: thecosmosmadeconscious)

kidsneedscience:

Today is the birthday of Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet, born March 7, 1792 and died May 11, 1871.  The son of astronomer William Herschel and Mary Baldwin, John Herschel was an accomplished scientist, mathematician and is considered one of the founding inventors of photography, a word he coined. A prolific and tireless worker, he was active in many diverse fields, from botany to astronomy-he named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus.

The word photography comes from two Ancient Greek words, phos (photos is the genitive form) meaning light-the source for words like photon and graphein meaning to write.  The word photography actually has two modern etymologies:  the word was coined in French in 1834 by Hercules Florence, five years before Herschel independently proposed it in English. Herschel decided on the terms positive and negative to describe the steps of early photography, and it was his early research and discovery of that sodium thiosulfate was a solvent of silver halides that led to the definitive discovery of photography twenty years later by Louis Daugerre and John Fox Talbot.  

The photograph here of Herschel was taken in 1867, only 38 years after the discovery of photography, was taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, considered by many to be the first true ‘celebrity’ photographer.  

Capitalizing on the incomparable optical capabilities of the Keck Telescope, scientists have gained an unprecedented look at the atmosphere of Uranus, providing new insight into some of the most enigmatic weather in the solar system.

A pair of images unveiled here at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, reveal more cloud features - an abundance of atmospheric phenomena that vary dramatically in size, brightness and longevity - than have been observed before on Uranus.

The two sides of the planet Uranus, as viewed in this composite image, by the Keck II Telescope at near infrared wavelengths. These new images of the seventh planet from the sun promise to help scientists unravel the mysteries of the weather on Uranus. More detail. (Image courtesy Lawrence Sromovsky, Space Science and Engineering Center.)

“The cloud features range from small to large, from dim and diffuse to sharp and bright, from rapidly-evolving systems to stable features that last for years,” says Lawrence Sromovsky, a senior scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Center.

What’s more, the new Keck images captured several Uranian weather oddities, including a big southern hemisphere storm feature that, during the course of several years, seesaws over 5 degrees of latitude.

“It’s weird behavior that hasn’t been recognized before on Uranus. It’s similar to what’s been seen on Neptune, although there the oscillation is much more rapid,” Sromovsky explains. “It is not surprising to see cloud features drifting in latitude, but our models don’t show these oscillations. We don’t know what makes it keep coming back to its starting point.”

Another unusual Uranian weather feature is a long, narrow complex of cloud features that is probably the largest group of atmospheric features ever seen on the planet. Spotted in the northern hemisphere of Uranus, the 18,000-mile-long complex of clouds dissipated completely during the span of a month.

“These more dynamic systems seem to develop at northern latitudes where they rise to even higher latitudes, apparently using up energy and dissipating relatively rapidly,” says Sromovsky, who conducted the new Keck observations with Patrick Fry, also of the Space Science and Engineering Center.

Together, the new images of Uranus reveal more than 30 cloud features, exceeding the total observed in all pictures obtained by the Voyager probe, the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes up to the year 2000.

The scientific value of the new pictures lies in their ability to help scientists unravel some of the atmospheric novelties of Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun. The cloud features they show, for example, are being used to trace and help define wind patterns and predict the motions of the large storm systems that sweep across the pale blue planet.

“The large, longer-lived cloud features of Uranus may be underpinned by giant hurricane-like vortices, as we’ve seen on Neptune,” says Sromovsky, “but it’s unlikely that they are as violent as the hurricanes that routinely batter Florida, for example.”

Earthly hurricanes, he explains, dispense a lot of energy. Uranus, which is 19 times as far from the sun as the Earth, has far less solar energy to dissipate.

Uranian storms seem to survive and thrive because the atmosphere is “slippery,” providing less of the atmospheric resistance that help storms on Earth dispense their energy.

“There is very little temperature contrast and very little energy to drive the weather in Uranus,” says Sromovsky. “Whatever is happening has to be well lubricated; it has to be a low-friction environment.”

The quality of the new images, says Sromovsky, demonstrates the astonishing optical capabilities of one of the world’s premier ground-based telescopes: “The image quality is better than anything we’ve seen before. It is amazing that the amount of detail we can see from the ground with Keck far exceeds what we could see with Voyager during its relatively close pass by the planet. And we can get better resolution than Hubble, especially at the near infrared wavelengths we use to improve cloud contrast.”

Situated at the summit of Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano, the Keck Telescope boasts a 10-meter diameter segmented mirror, and a revolutionary adaptive optics system that detects and corrects most of the atmospheric effects that blur viewing.

Miranda’s Chevrons
Our only close-ups of Uranus’ moon Miranda come from Voyager 2’s flyby in 1986. The interesting surface of the moon may be made of ice and is a jumbled, faulted assemblage of older, heavily cratered terrain, interspersed with young land covered in scarps and ridges and features that may have been formed by upwelling of warmer water. One of Miranda’s distinctive “chevron” features, a v-shaped landscape, can be seen in the image.

Image: NASA/JPL/USGS

27 Years Ago: Voyager 2′s Visit to Uranus

27 years ago today, January 24, 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft sped past Uranus, becoming simultaneously the first and last spacecraft to visit the blue-tinged gas giant, third largest planet in the Solar System.

The image above shows the crescent-lit Uranus as seen by Voyager 2 from a distance of about 965,000 km (600,000 miles.) At the time the spacecraft had already passed Uranus and was looking back at the planet on its way outwards toward Neptune.

Although composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, trace amounts of methane in Uranus’ uppermost atmosphere absorbs most of the red wavelengths of light, making the planet appear a pale blue color.

The second of NASA’s twin space explorers (although it launched first) Voyager 2 came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus on January 24, 1986, gathering images of the sideways planet, its rings and several of its moons. Voyager 2 also discovered the presence of a magnetic field around Uranus, as well as 10 new small moons.

At the time of this writing, Voyager 2 is 15,184,370,900 km from Earth and steadily moving toward the edge of the Solar System at a speed of about 3.3 AU per year. At that distance, signals from Voyager take just over 14 hours and 4 minutes to reach us.

See images from Voyager 2′s visit of Uranus here, and check out a video of the August 20, 1977 launch here, along with more images from the historic Voyager mission’s “Grand Tour” of the outer Solar System.

image 1: Image of Uranus’ crescent taken by a departing Voyager 2 on January 25, 1986 (NASA/JPL)
image 2: The 1,500-km-wide Oberon acquired by Voyager 2 on Jan. 24, 1986 (NASA/JPL)
image 3: Three moons discovered by Voyager 2 in 1986 (NASA/JPL)

Watch: Voyager 2’s Majestic “Grand Tour” Of The Solar System

ikenbot:

Bright Clouds on Uranus

The false colors in this image indicate altitude.

Credit: Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona) and NASA

The green and blue regions show where the atmosphere is clear, allowing sunlight to penetrate deep into Uranus. In the yellow and gray regions, a haze or cloud layer is reflecting sunlight away. Orange and red colors indicate very high clouds, like cirrus clouds on Earth.

kidsneedscience:

The planet Uranus has 27 known moons, the first two of which (Titania and Oberon) were discovered by the man who discovered Uranus, Sir William Hershel, in 1787. Although Herschel believed he had seen as many as 6 moons and possibly a ring, nothing more was confirmed for another 50 years when the next two moons were discovered by William Lassell, which he named Ariel and Umbriel. Lassell deviated slightly from Herschel’s naming tradition and found Umbriel in Alexander Pope’s poem the Rape of the Lock. Since then all additional moons have been named for characters from either Shakespeare or Pope.

First, moons named after characters from Shakespeare:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Titania, Oberon, Puck
• The Tempest: (Ariel), Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Francisco, Ferdinand
• King Lear: Cordelia
• Hamlet: Ophelia
• The Taming of the Shrew: Bianca
• Troilus and Cressida: Cressida
• Othello: Desdemona
• Romeo and Juliet: Juliet, Mab
• The Merchant of Venice: Portia
• As You Like It: Rosalind
• Much Ado About Nothing: Margaret
• The Winter’s Tale: Perdita
• Timon of Athens: Cupid

Next, moons named from characters from Pope:

The Rape of the Lock :

• Ariel, Umbriel, Belinda

After the two moons discovered in the 1850s, another moon wasn’t discovered for another century, in 1948. The remaining almost two dozen moons were not discovered until the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986.

Learn more about the plays (including plots, characters and full texts) at www.shakespeare-online.com. You can find Alexander Pope at www.poemhunter.com. You can also click on any of the links above for links to wikipedia.

Image of Uranus’s moons to scale courtesy NASA, in the public domain.

space-pics:

Pretty happy I was able to snap Uranus and its moons 15th Oct 2012 

http://space-pics.tumblr.com/

(Source: looking-at-the-universe)

mentalalchemy:

Uranus, infrared

sklogw:

The Colorful Lives of the Outer Planets

Atmospheric features on Uranus and Neptune are revealed in images taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The observations were taken in August 2003.

The top row reveals Uranus and Neptune in natural colors, showing the planets as they would appear if we could see them through a telescope. The images are made of exposures taken with filters sensitive to red, green, and blue light. In the bottom images, astronomers used different color filters to detect features we can’t see. The photographs demonstrate that, by using certain types of color filters, astronomers can extract more information about a celestial object than our eyes normally can see.

At first glance, the top row of images makes the planets appear like twins. But the bottom row reveals that Uranus and Neptune are two different worlds. Uranus’s rotational axis, for example, is tilted almost 90 degrees to Neptune’s axis. The south poles of Uranus and Neptune are at the left and bottom, respectively. Both are tilted slightly toward Earth. Uranus also displays more contrast between both hemispheres. This may be caused by its extreme seasons.

Both planets display a banding structure of clouds and hazes aligned parallel to the equator. Additionally, a few discrete cloud features appear bright orange or red. The color is due to methane absorption in the red part of the spectrum. Methane is third in abundance in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune after hydrogen and helium, which are both transparent. Colors in the bands correspond to variations in the altitude and thickness of hazes and clouds. The colors allow scientists to measure the altitudes of clouds from far away.

Credit: NASA and Erich Karkoschka, University of Arizona

(Source: spaceplasma)

sklogw:

This image of Uranus was taken on 11 August 2006 with the Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch (5-meter) Hale Telescope and its Adaptive Optics  system.  The Adaptive Optics system removes the blurring effects of Earth’s atmosphere to produce very high resolution images.

Don Banfield of Cornell University collected and processed the data to produce this false color image. The image was recorded in three near-infrared wavelengths: “J” centered at 1.250 microns, “H” at 1.635 microns, and “Ks” at 2.150. The images were combined as red, green, and blue to create this false-color image. Several cloud features can be seen at Uranus’ atmosphere. The planet’s rings show up as the red area off of the planet’s disk.

The research was based on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory, as part of a collaborative agreement between the California Institute of Technology, its divisions Caltech Optical Observatories and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (operated for NASA), and Cornell University.

(Source: spaceplasma)

(via astronautjimblows)

myfroggylife:

March 10: The Rings of Uranus were discovered, almost by accident.

(via likeaphysicist)