Uranus and Moons
Date: 1 Jan 1986

Uranus and its five major moons are depicted in this montage of images acquired by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.


Uranus appears as a uniformly blue globe, similar to how the eye would naturally see it; only with computer-aided image processing do subtle bands in the planet's upper atmosphere appear. The moons, from largest to smallest as they appear here, are Ariel, Miranda, Titania, Oberon and Umbriel.


Voyager 2 also discovered 10 new, smaller moons and relayed images of Uranus's ring system during the planetary encounter nearly 2 billion miles from Earth.


Last Update: 29 Mar 2011 (AMB)

Credit: NASA/JPL