Would you believe Uranus's green color is not what really makes it such an unusual planet? As most of the planets follow their orbits around the sun, they spin or rotate on their axis, usually with their north poles pointing almost straight up. Uranus's North Pole, as it makes one part of an orbit, faces the sun, yet in another part of its orbit, the South Pole does. None of the astronomers seem to know when or how the planet's axis became tilted. If you could stand on either of the poles when they are facing the sun, the sun would appear to circle in the sky. Watching that would be enough to make anyone dizzy. As the year goes on, Uranus has equal days and nights then eventually the other pole has the sun circling around it. Because the North Pole lies below what would be Uranus'sequator, its rotation is retrograde or backwards, which means the sun, as it gets further from the poles, rises in the West. Doesn't that make you wonder what clocks and calendars would look like on Uranus? It is probably a good thing that nobody lives there!

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Seeing Colors

Color can play tricks on your eyes. To see this first hand, try staring at a colored picture for a few minutes (pictures that contain red and blue work well), then stare at a white wall. What do you see?

What Color Is the Sky?

Have you ever wondered why the sky is blue? When scientists studied the sky they realized the color blue was absorbed more by the atmosphere than any other, so that is the color you see when the sunlight reflects off of it. You may be wondering how can that be? Pretendthat each color in the rainbow is a different sized ball with red as the smallest and violet as the biggest one. If the atmosphere lets all of the balls fall through it until only the blue and violet ones remain, the light will shine on those allowing you to only see blue light. So why isn't the sky purple? Because of the way our eyes work we see the blue better. Although most of Uranus's atmosphere is hydrogen and helium, it also has methanegas that cannot reflect red or yellow, so all that can be seen from Earth is a tiny greenish-blue dot! This is one thing that made it really hard to find Uranus. It was only by accident that Uranus was discovered; a stargazer who was looking for something else found it one night. At that time no one knew there was another planet. Maybe one day you will find a new planet.