PLANET SEARCH

FUTURES:
Winner of Sir Arthur Clarke Award for 'Best Written Presentation', 2005

Planet Search - Find the image you want!

PAY FOR ANY ITEM
Use any common credit or debit card to pay for your purchase.

Neptune
The Blue Giant
  • Diameter: 30,775 miles/49,528 km
  • Distance from Sun: 2,795 million miles/4,498 M km
  • Length of Year: 164.8 Earth years
  • Rotation: 16 hours 7 minutes
    Gravity (x Earth's): 1.1
  • Axial Tilt: 29.6 degrees
  • Average Temperature: -201C
In 1991 Voyager 2 made a fly-by of Neptune and sent back intriguing images of dark streaks on the surface of its large moon, Triton. This painting, made on my return from JPL, shows a geyser erupting from the pinkish nitrogen/methane ice of the satellite. It appeared as a cover on Sky and Telescope (USA), Popular Astronomy (UK), and elsewhere. Geyser on Neptune

The geysers in the above painting turned out to be a bit too violent! Later research showed that they actually take the form of columns of gas which rise vertically for several kilometres and are then sheared off by high-altitude winds. Here, one is erupting inside a valley, while another is just beyind the horizon. The outfall of dark material against the thin haze on Triton is slightly exaggerated.

From Futures

 


e-mail: AstroArt Tel/Fax: 0121 777 1802 (intl: +44 -0)