Happy One Year Anniversary to Planet Neptune – Dale’s Daily Data

I think one of our Battle of the Sexes questions this week was which planet was discovered using a telescope.  I think the answer was Uranus and I thought that was odd because Uranus is the seventh planet from the sun – further than Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.  But those planets are visible to the naked eye – they look like stars in the night time sky.  Uranus is not visible to the naked eye so that’s why a telescope was needed.

The discovery of the eighth planet of the sun - Neptune was made using a telescope in 1846 and it’s been one year since that discovery.  One Neptune year.  It takes just shy of 165 Earth years for Neptune to orbit the sun, so it was just a couple of weeks ago that one year anniversary of its discovery was made.

Neptune spins on its axis a lot faster than Earth does.  One day on Neptune is just under 16 hours, so Neptune spins 78,400 times during its orbit around the sun.

Its seasons last 40 years and since it’s the solar system’s coldest and most remote planet winter must be awful tough to deal with.   It’s named for the Roman god of the sea.

SOURCE: Wordpress.com – most odd