Yes, yes, rings around Uranus, haha

Poor Uranus. Besides having a name guaranteed to make 12-year-old-boys giggle*, to most people it lacks any sort of interest. It isn't huge, like Jupiter, or bright, like Venus, or shine with a striking red color, like Mars. It doesn't have giant glorious rings like Saturn... but it does have rings, and sometimes they can be pretty cool too. Uranus orbits the Sun once every 84 years (hey, I'm 6 Uranus months old!), and that means that once every 42 years, the Earth and Uranus line up in just the right way that we see those rings edge-on. That's useful-- it can help us measure how thick the rings are, for one. For another, very faint parts of the ring can be seen more easily since the brighter main rings don't drown them out. Earth passed through Uranus's ring plane in mid-August. Since the rings were only discovered in 1977, ...