Hubble Celebrates Neptune’s First Birthday.

Enlarge. | Via.

We’re all celebrating Neptune’s first birthday here on Earth. You know, since we discovered it. We have that habit, us humans. Deciding that when we find something that’s existed that it’s some sort of achievement. Anyways, to celebrate Neptune’s first birf-day, Hubble dropped some pictures to celebrate.

Bad Astronomy:

In the big Hubble image above, the pink color is infrared light reflected from high-altitude clouds, and each image was taken four hours apart. In the smaller picture here (click to embiggen it), several of Neptune’s moons can be seen, showing up as a series of dots as they moved between exposures. At the moment, 13 moons orbiting Neptune are known, ranging from the 2700-km-wide (1600 mile) Triton down to some smallish guys only 40 or so km across. There are undoubtedly more, but the planet is a long way off, and anything smaller than that is really hard to see.

We’ve learned a huge amount about Neptune – all the planets, of course! – since it was discovered in 1846. With bigger telescopes, better detectors, and the ability to leave the bonds of Earth and loft telescopes above the atmosphere – and even carry them on probes that go to the planets themselves, like Voyager 2 did when it flew past Neptune in 1989 – our curiosity has only increased. And to think, we’ve only been studying Neptune for one year…

Pleasure to study you, Neptune. It’s amazing how technological progress brings all these cosmic wunders into sharper image.