Acknowledgement. We thank Science for their permission to use an excerpt from:

Broadfoot, A. L., et al. 1989. Ultraviolet Spectrometer observations of Neptune and Triton. Science 246 (4936), 1459-1466. (Excerpt from p. 1465.)

Ultraviolet Spectrometer observations of Neptune and Triton

Rings. In addition to the atmospheric occultations described here, the UVS also observed an occultation of the B2.5 V star sigma Sagittarii by the ring system. This occultation (Table 1), which was simultaneously observed by the photopolarimeter experiment (29), intersected the ring plane between 3.1 and 1.7 R_N. The only event unambiguously identified in the UVS data is associated with N1R. This event appears as a low tau feature (mean tau = 0.02) having a total width of approximately 35 km with a somewhat more opaque central core ~15 km wide. The equivalent width, defined as the width-integrated optical depth of the ring, was found to be 0.66 +/- 0.12 km. The absorption feature caused by the ring is centered at spacecraft event time 236/23:24:46.37, which corresponds to a planetocentric radius of 62,843 km for the ring, assuming a Neptune rotation pole of right ascension alpha = 298.9 degrees and declination delta = 42.8 degrees.

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Last updated Feb-27-1997