This Planet-Uranus-in-astronomy page and the entire website are excerpted from You and the Universe, a handmade, individualized fine art book on astrology, mythology and astronomy through which the recipient's complete astrological reading is woven.

Uranus was accidentally discovered in 1781 by William Herschel, a musician and amateur astronomer. Although it can just be seen with the naked eye— and was catalogued as a star at least back to the 1600’s—its planetary nature was apparently not known until Herschel’s discovery. Uranus is almost four times the diameter of Earth, and orbits the Sun once every 84 years at 1.8 billion miles, twice Saturn’s distance. Ruling eccentricity and personal genius, Uranus shows its own eccentricity by being the only planet in the solar system whose axis of rotation is perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. This is believed to be the result of a collision with a planet-sized body early in its history. Its rings, however, are not that unusual. All the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) have them.

Unlike other satellites that take their names from classical mythology, Uranus’ moons take their names from the writings of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. The ten largest are Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Sycorax, Puck, Portia, Caliban and Juliet. The Keck telescope took the Uranus image above using adaptive optics, a technology that compensates for the turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere by rapidly deforming hundreds of tiny mirrors in the telescope’s light path to exactly compensate for the turbulence in that light path.