First time in decades...

Read more at Planetary Society Weblog: Earth crosses the Uranian ring plane May 2

Because the orbits of Earth and Uranus are not coplanar, we will cross the ring plane again in August 16 and yet again in February 20. Next time takes a while as it occurs in 2049.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Hopefully some Hubble time will be dedicated to this.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this is the first ring-plane crossing since the discovery of the rings. It should be interesting to see what happens.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

With Saturn's ring plane crossings occur, we use that time to look for faint new moons don't we? Wonder if anyone was looking at Uranus for any during its ring-crossing...

We used to, but now with Hubble we don't have to wait for the "dark of the rings" to do this. What I had in mind was phenomena such as back-scattering of the rings and the like.

Edited to add: This is my 3,000th post. Closing in on one kilopi of posts next.

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.