The Most Detailed Images of Uranus' Atmosphere Ever 105
New submitter monkeyhybrid writes "The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla reports on the most detailed images of Uranus ever taken. The infrared sensitivity of the ground based Keck II telescope's NIRC2 instrument enabled astronomers to see below the high level methane based atmosphere that has hampered previous observations, and with unprecedented clarity. If you ever thought Uranus was a dull blue looking sphere then look again; you could easily mistake these images for being of Jupiter!"
Name Change (Score:5, Informative)
They really have to change that planet's name.
Etymology:
It was originally called "Georgium Sidus" after King George III, but since no one liked that name a bunch of unofficial alternatives were thought up. Uranus eventually won out and even became official in 1850. Uranus being the Latinized version of the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos. Bode argued that just as Saturn was the father of Jupiter, the new planet should be named after the father of Saturn. In 1789, Bode's Royal Academy colleague Martin Klaproth named his newly discovered element "uranium" in support of Bode's choice.
Not really two rotation axes, just two components (Score:2, Informative)
(It rotates on 2 axies; one roughly parallel to the solar ecliptic, and one perpendicular to it.)
For one, the rotation due to orbiting around the Sun is a little over 40,000 times slower. So the contributions of that to any Coriolis forces would also be about 40,000 times weaker than the rotation of the planet. Second, things like the Coriolis effect only really care about the total rotation of the frame you are talking about. So the angular velocities of the rotation of the planet and orbit would combine to have just a single angular velocity vector that results in a single Coriolis force. The break down into revolutions and orbits would be just two components of a single rotation.