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Old 06-12-2015, 07:53 PM
Dennis
Dazzled by the Cosmos.

Dennis is offline
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 11,704
Uranus and satellites: Ariel, Miranda, Umbriel, Titania & Oberon

I thought I’d give the ASI174MM and Televue x2 Powermate a work out to see if I could record the elusive Uranian satellite Miranda, at mag 16.5, never further that 9 arc secs from Uranus.

Working at an efl of 4320mm (Tak Mewlon 180 F12) I succeeded, mainly due to the above average seeing conditions. The disc of Uranus is grossly overexposed in the raw stacked image from Autostakkert2! and was replaced with an RGB image recorded earlier. The enhanced and annotated images were then completed in CS6.

The image data was obtained from Sky Safari Pro 4 running on my iPad.

Uranus (mag 5.75) was discovered by William Herschel on March 13, 1781 and has a diameter of 51,118.0km and an apparent size of 3.6".

A search on the internet indicates that the name is derived from a figure from Greek mythology, from the Latinized version of the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos.

Located some 19.4 AU from my back garden, Uranus has 27 known natural satellites. The names of these satellites are chosen from characters in the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. The five main satellites are Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon.

Name Mag PA° Sep"
Ariel 14.4 265 6.5
Miranda 16.54 357 8.3
Umbriel 15.0 334 17.7
Titania 14.0 119 18.6
Oberon 14.2 54 21.1

Only one spacecraft in the history of spaceflight has ever made a close approach to Uranus. NASA’s Voyager 2 zipped past Uranus in January, 1986, coming within 81,000 km of the surface of Uranus.

Uranus's rotation axis is nearly horizontal, as though the planet has been knocked on its side. With an axis tilt of about 97.7 degrees, Uranus rolls on its side as it orbits around the Sun.

Miranda was discovered in 1948 by astronomer Gerard Kuiper. Miranda is the smallest of the rounded satellites of Uranus. It also orbits the closest of the five larger moons. It is named after one of the characters in Shakespeare’s play, “The Tempest”.

Cheers

Dennis
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