Point your telescope to that spot and you’ll see it. That’s when it’ll be floating three degrees (or six moon-widths) directly above the nearly-full Moon. And your best bet to see Neptune (with a telescope) might be coming up on October 7, 2022. This month is when it’s closest to Earth and at its brightest of the entire 2022. Still, how would you locate that faint 7.7 magnitude dot? Best Bet to View Neptune Such a teensy disk is technically resolvable by good backyard telescopes, but its two arcsecond diameter makes it barely distinguishable from the many little smudgy twinkling background stars in the dim constellation of Aquarius. If you were on Neptune, the Sun would look so small and faint that high noon would appear as dim twilight. Neptune is located 30 times more distant from the Sun than Earth is, so that it only appears the size of a quarter dollar coin held up 1 ½ miles away from you. That’s because, though it’s four times Earth’s diameter, it’s so far away!Ĭredit: ESO’s Very Large Telescope/P. Neptune is the only planet that can’t be observed with the naked eye, and even an expensive backyard telescope only shows it as a tiny disk. It’s this methane-commonly called natural gas-that helps make the planet blue, since it absorbs the red section of the sunlight hitting it. The part seen with backyard telescopes-its upper cloud layers-are hydrogen and helium with a little methane added for variety. The eighth and farthest planet from our Sun, Neptune is an ice giant that is enormous enough to fit 58 planet Earths inside if it were hollow. Here’s Bob Berman’s latest post about the news-plus, some facts about the outermost planet. No, those aren’t Saturn’s rings! This is the first (stunning!) image of planet Neptune by the new Webb telescope, showing off several narrow rings on our outermost planet.
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