Posted 8/19/2010 08:35:00 PM by Douglas

It's been a sweet year, Neptune, but we're richer for having known you.

The planet Neptune will be in opposition — when the sun, Earth, and a planet fall in a straight line on Aug. 20. The planet will be exactly opposite the sun in the sky, being highest in the sky at local midnight. Usually this is also the point where the planet is closest to the Earth.

This opposition is special because Neptune will be returning close to the spot where it was discovered in 1846, marking its first complete trip around the sun since its discovery. Neptune is close, but still not quite at the finish line of its first orbit since being discovered yet. That will occur in 2011, according to NASA.

This is significant because the discovery of Neptune is a true story of scientific discovery:

The planet Uranus was discovered more or less by accident in 1781 by Sir William Herschel, in the course of his search for deep sky objects. As time went by, Uranus' position wasn't quite what astronomer's predicted, and mathematical astronomers began to suspect that there was another planet out there whose gravity was influencing Uranus' motion.

In the mid-1840s an Englishman named John Couch Adams and a Frenchman named Urbain Le Verrier independently calculated where this new planet would have to be located to have the observed effect on Uranus, but both had trouble getting observational astronomers interested in looking for it.

Finally the German astronomer Johann Galle actually looked at the predicted location and discovered the tiny blue-green disk of the planet that eventually came to be known as Neptune. The date was Sept. 23, 1846.

The numbers don't add up, so point your telescopes. . . there. . . and you'll find another planet. That's a lot of complicated calculations, when the best calculator was a slide rule.

Oh yeah, suck it Pluto. You're still just a fart in the wind.