NASA/JPL-Caltech/Voyager 2Various views of Neptune, 1989Gelatin silver and chromogenic printsImages
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Voyager 2Various views of Neptune, 1989Gelatin silver and chromogenic printsImages courtesy NASA/JPL-CaltechThe top right photograph shows Neptune’s ring system. Each half of the image represents a single 591-second exposure, taken with a clear filter. Neptune’s rings were too faint to register if Neptune itself were in view, evidenced by the overexposure at the inner edge of both halves of the image due to the planet’s much greater brightness.In the middle image, the evolution of Neptune’s weather is visible over a period of thirty-six hours, spanning two revolutions of the planet. This series of three photographs, each taken eighteen hours apart, documents changes in the clouds of frozen methane surrounding Neptune’s Great Dark Spot (a storm system with roughly the diameter of Earth).Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to encounter Uranus and Neptune up-close. It discovered ten previously unknown satellites of Uranus and six of Neptune. The views captured nearly three decades ago by Voyager 2 remain the best images of both outer planets.The prints on view in the Our Solar System gallery are on loan from the University of Arizona Space Imagery Center. A partial selection of those images is recreated here using digital scans of a different set of Voyager 2 prints made by the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory in cooperation with NASA. To view thousands more photographs from NASA’s Planetary Image Archive, visit photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov. -- source link
#caltech#voyager 2#neptune#chromogenic print#twentieth century#20th century#astronomical