♅ Uranus

How to follow Uranus live

The panel above recomputes Uranus every second in your browser: how far it is from the Sun and from Earth (in AU and in kilometers), its apparent magnitude, the illuminated fraction, the phase angle and the elongation from the Sun. The magnitude tells you at a glance whether Uranus is visible to the naked eye tonight or needs a telescope.

The top-down map of the Solar System then shows exactly where Uranus sits among the other planets right now. Run time with the day slider, zoom and pan, click a second planet to compare distances, or press "Next event" to jump to the next opposition or closest approach to Earth, the best moment to observe it.

Quick facts

About Uranus

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and the first that humankind discovered with the help of a telescope: William Herschel spotted it on 13 March 1781 from the garden of his home in Bath, England. Until then, no one suspected there were worlds beyond Saturn. Despite its size, four times wider than Earth, it sits so far away and so faintly that it barely touches the limit of naked-eye visibility under a very dark sky.

Unlike Jupiter and Saturn, made mostly of hydrogen and helium, Uranus is classified as an ice giant: beneath the atmosphere, most of its mass is a hot, dense mix of water, methane and ammonia in a supercritical state wrapped around a small rocky core. Methane high in the atmosphere absorbs the Sun's red light and returns the characteristic blue-green colour.

Physical characteristics

Its equatorial diameter is about 51,000 km, making Uranus the third largest planet in diameter, behind only Jupiter and Saturn. The calm, almost uniform blue-green colour does not come from water: methane in the upper atmosphere absorbs the Sun's red light and sends blue back into space. Neptune has the same cause for its colour but appears far more vivid.

Uranus is classified as an ice giant because its makeup differs from the gas giants. Much of the interior is a thick fluid of water, methane and ammonia under extreme pressure and temperature, sitting above a rocky core only a little larger than Earth. At the cloud tops, Uranus records the coldest atmospheric temperatures of any planet, with lows near -224 degrees Celsius, colder than Neptune despite being closer to the Sun. This happens because Uranus apparently emits almost no internal heat, unlike all the other giant planets.

The tilted axis and extreme seasons

Uranus's most peculiar trait is its axial tilt: nearly 98 degrees relative to its orbital plane. Instead of spinning roughly upright like Earth, it rolls almost on its side, tumbling along its orbit like a ball. That produces absolutely extreme seasons. For part of the orbit one pole points straight at the Sun while the other is plunged into total darkness. Each pole spends about 21 years in continuous sunlight and 21 years in permanent night.

The most widely accepted explanation is that an impact with a planet-sized body during the formation of the Solar System knocked Uranus into this orientation. Because the tilt involves the entire ring and moon system, all 27 confirmed moons and the 13 known rings orbit in the planet's equatorial plane, almost at right angles to the orbital path.

Orbit and motion in the sky

Uranus orbits the Sun at about 19.2 astronomical units, close to 2.9 billion km, and takes roughly 84 Earth years to complete a single lap. Someone born under a given position of the planet will only see it return to the same point in the zodiac more than eight decades later.

Its slow pace means it creeps just a few degrees per year among the constellations, lingering in the same region for years. In 2025 Uranus sits in Taurus, near the Pleiades cluster. Opposition comes once a year; in October 2025 the planet reaches roughly magnitude 5.7, still at the naked-eye limit but easy to confirm with binoculars.

How to find Uranus in the night sky

Uranus sits right at the edge of naked-eye visibility. Under a very dark sky, far from city lights, and with the right position in hand, it appears as a faint star easy to mistake for any other. That faintness kept it hidden through all of antiquity. Herschel identified it as non-stellar only because he noticed that the "point" showed a disc when he increased the magnification of his telescope.

• With steady binoculars or a small telescope you can already make out a tiny blue-green disc instead of a point, which confirms you have found the planet.
• The best time is the annual opposition, when Earth passes between the Sun and Uranus: the planet stays up all night and reaches peak brightness, around magnitude 5.6 to 5.9.
• Use a sky app or a star chart to aim at it, because to the naked eye nothing sets it apart from surrounding stars without the telescope disc confirmation.
• With larger telescopes (200 mm or more) in very good atmospheric conditions, the disc's edges may appear slightly brighter than the centre, a reversed limb-darkening effect.

Moons and rings

Uranus has 28 known moons, all named after characters from William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, including Titania, Oberon, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel and Puck. That unusual choice was made by Herschel's son John Herschel and his son-in-law William Lassell, who discovered the first moons and chose to break with the Greco-Roman mythological tradition used for the other planets.

Miranda, the smallest of the five major moons, holds the tallest known cliff in the Solar System: Verona Rupes, a scarp with more than 20 km of vertical drop, ten times the depth of the Grand Canyon. The current hypothesis is that Miranda was shattered by an impact and reassembled under gravity, creating the chaotic topography. In 2023, NASA's NAIF confirmed evidence suggesting possible subsurface oceans on Titania and Oberon, making Uranus's moons potential targets in the search for habitability. Uranus has 13 narrow, dark rings, discovered in 1977 when the planet occulted a star and the rings caused brightness dips before and after the planet passed.

Exploration and the Uranus Orbiter mission

Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus: Voyager 2, which flew past in January 1986 at a closest approach of about 81,500 km above the cloud tops. The images revealed an almost featureless disc, subsonic winds and the main moons. The visit lasted just a few hours; since then Uranus has been studied only remotely, by telescopes such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope.

JWST photographed Uranus in 2023 with unprecedented resolution for a space telescope, revealing the faintest inner ring and details in the polar caps. The US Planetary Science Decadal Survey, published in 2022, named a Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission the number-one priority for the next generation of large NASA missions. If funded in time, a probe could depart between 2031 and 2038, taking advantage of the most efficient trajectory windows.

Uranus facts and records

• It was the first planet discovered with a telescope, by William Herschel on 13 March 1781. Herschel originally wanted to name it Georgium Sidus (George's Star) in honour of King George III of Great Britain.
• It has the coldest atmosphere in the Solar System, with lows near -224 °C at the cloud tops, colder than Neptune despite being closer to the Sun.
• The Verona Rupes cliff on Miranda drops more than 20 km vertically, the largest known precipice in the Solar System.
• The 98° axial tilt means the rings and moons of Uranus orbit nearly at right angles to the planet's path around the Sun.
• Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus: Voyager 2, in 1986. Since then, 40 years of study have relied entirely on remote telescopes.

Other planets

• ☿ Mercury
• ♀ Venus
• ♂ Mars
• ♃ Jupiter
• ♄ Saturn
• ♆ Neptune