木星的環比天王星暗而細長.....而且你看過南歐天文台新聞就無話可信般相信了。
Don't worry - you are not the only one who thought this was a nice amateur photo of planet Saturn, Lord of the Rings in our Solar System!
But then the relative brightness and positions of the moons may appear somewhat unfamiliar... and the ring system does look unusually bright when compared to the planetary disk...??
Well, it is not Saturn, but Uranus, the next giant planet further out, located at a distance of about 3,000 million km, or 20 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
The photo shows Uranus surrounded by its rings and some of the moons, as they appear on a near-infrared image that was obtained in the Ks-band (at wavelength 2.2 µm) with the ISAAC multi-mode instrument on the 8.2-m VLT ANTU telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile). The exposure was made on November 19, 2002 (03:00 hrs UT) during a planetary research programme. The observing conditions were excellent (seeing 0.5 arcsec) and the exposure lasted 5 min. The angular diameter of Uranus is about 3.5 arcsec.
The observers at ISAAC were Emmanuel Lellouch and Thérése Encrenaz of the Observatoire de Paris (France) and Jean-Gabriel Cuby and Andreas Jaunsen (both ESO-Chile). |
置顶卡
变色卡
千斤顶
显身卡
