Uranus and its moons, 04.09.2019
Uranus is with a brightness of 5.7mag quite bright and shines in a hue, which for me probably comes closest to a soft yellow-green. I have never seen it really green. With
an apparent diameter of 3.6" (arcseconds) it is also quite small, but can be seen as a tiny disk already at a magnification of 120x.
Relatively difficult are the many moons orbiting Uranus. Five of them should be theoretically visible with my 20" Dobson. The faintest is "Miranda" with a brightness of
16.5mag. But on this evening this moon was quite close to Uranus, so I had no chance to see this extremely faint dot next to the 10 magnitude brighter planetary disk. At
least I could recognize the other four moons, whereby the two inner moons in the halo of the bright Uranus disk were recognizable only with indirect vision. All in all not
an easy observation!
