Neptune Images Download _HOT_
Dallas Whitmoyer
The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. Here you'll find some of those iconic images, including "The Pale Blue Dot" - famously described by Carl Sagan - and what are still the only up-close images of Uranus and Neptune.
Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April, after taking almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.
NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January. At its closet, the spacecraft came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops on Jan. 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.
Photos are one of the best ways for people to discover the beauty and majesty of the worlds of our Solar System. A quick search for images of Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn will yield countless amazing results. But if you search for pictures of Uranus or Neptune, you might be disappointed; there are only a handful of high spatial resolution images of these ice giants.
The primary reason why there are so few close-up images of Uranus and Neptune is that these planets are very far away, making them very difficult and costly to explore. As a result, neither planet has ever had its own dedicated mission.
The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a few photos of these distant worlds, and JWST has already delivered some remarkable images of them both. Planetary astronomers capture images of the ice giants regularly using ground-based telescopes like the Keck Observatory as well. But none of these generate the kind of close-up, high spatial resolution images that could be achieved by a flyby mission.
df19127ead