Gallery | My Favorite Planet Pics

Gallery | My Favorite Planet Pics | Neptune

Voyager 2 passed Neptune in the late 1980s and returned awesome pictures. While the one I decided to post here may not grab you as instantly as those would have, I wanted to use it because I think it's really cool. It was taken by the New Horizons probe, a relatively small but ambitious mission that is sending the probe flying past Pluto in 2015.

Pluto crosses Neptune's orbit, but due to the timings of their motion they never get very close; Pluto is in no danger of crashing into Neptune. So this picture taken by New Horizons is from a long way off: 4 billion kilometers, in fact! Neptune actually gets closer than this to Earth sometimes... which may give you an idea of just how far away this spacecraft is. The shot shows Neptune (overexposed in the middle) as well as its frozen moon Triton. Pluto and Triton have quite a bit in common -- they're about the same size, temperature, and have the same atmospheric composition -- so this was a good practice shot for the mission. It also gives me a lot of confidence that when it does pass by Pluto, we'll get some amazing pictures.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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