This pictures of Uranus was compiled from images recorded by Voyager 2 on
January 10, 1986, when the NASA spacecraft was 18 million kilometers (11 million
miles) from the planet. The images were obtained by Voyager's narrow-angle
camera; the view is toward the planet's pole of rotation, which lies just left
of center. The picture has been processed to show Uranus as human eyes would see
it from the vantage point of the spacecraft. The dark shading of the upper right
edge of the disk is the terminator, or day-night boundary. The blue-green
appearance of Uranus results from methane in the atmosphere; this gas absorbs
red wavelengths from the incoming sunlight, leaving the predominant bluish color
seen here. Images shuttered through different color filters were added and
manipulated by computer, greatly enhancing the low-contrast details in the
original images. The planet reveals a dark polar hood surrounded by a series of
progressively lighter convective bands. The banded structure is real, though
exaggerated here. The Voyager project is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory.
