About Neptune
Neptune is an epic planet. It completes an orbit every 60,182 days and swings within 29.812 AU of the Sun at perihelion.
It is orbited by 16 known moons.
Epic planet 73 EP
Neptune
Position computed live · planets
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Live ephemeris
This object moves — fetching its current position…
Score breakdown
· 5 badgesEpic 78 pts → Anomaly
- Major planet +40
- Thick atmosphere +12
- Has a proper name +8
- Has a ring system +8
- Has moons +5
Total score 73
5 more points to reach Anomaly.
Badges
- Major planet · +40
- Has a proper name · +8
- Has a ring system · +8
- Has moons · +5
- Thick atmosphere · +12
Trivia
What it actually is
- Its moons. It is orbited by 16 known moons.
Sense of scale
- Against Earth. It is 3.9 times wider than Earth, and about 57.7 Earths would fit inside it.
- Ground to cover. Its whole surface adds up to about 7.6 billion km² — roughly 51.2 times Earth's dry land.
- Walk around it. Walking right round its equator, eight hours a day, would take about 10.6 years.
Standing on it
- Heavy air. A thick atmosphere presses down on the surface — the sky here is anything but empty.
- Rings overhead. Its rings are billions of icy fragments, most no bigger than a house, spread into a sheet only tens of metres thick.
By the numbers
- Size. About 49.2 thousand km across.
What's in a name
- Named. Notable enough to have earned a proper name, not just a catalogue number.
Properties
- aphelion au
- 30.3282
- color
- #3b5bdb
- diameter km
- 49244
- eccentricity
- 0.0086
- inclination
- 1.77
- name
- Neptune
- named
- yes
- num moons
- 16
- orbital period days
- 60182
- perihelion au
- 29.8116
- radius km
- 24622
- rings
- yes
- semi major au
- 30.0699
- thick atmosphere
- yes
How to see it
Like any astronomical target, Neptune is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. Because it moves against the background stars, the live position panel on this page tracks where it is right now. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.
Why Neptune is an epic planet
Neptune scores 73 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 5 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 5 science badges — Major planet, Has a proper name, Has a ring system, Has moons and Thick atmosphere — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.