Project by: John Isaac And Jazmine Carey Mercury Venus Earth MarsJupiterSaturnUranus Home page Choir Academy of Harlem

Mercury The planet Mercury is very difficult to study from the Earth because it is always so close to the Sun. Even at elongation, it is never more than 28 degrees from the Sun in our sky. It is the second smallest planet (it was believed to be the smallest until the discovery that Pluto is actually much smaller than originally thought), and also the fastest in its orbit since it is the innermost planet. In fact, the name Mercury derives from its speed in moving around its orbit. Click here to go to homepage

Venus In the last 30 years we have learned a great deal about our "sister" planet, and we now know that almost nothing on Venus is like that on the Earth. Much of the previous misconception can be traced to the difficulty of observing Venus because it is always covered with a thick cloud layer. In the past 3 decades astronomers have learned how to peer through that cloud layer and unlock many of the secrets of this nearby but previously not well known planet. Click here to go to homepage

Earth The Earth is certainly the most familiar planet, though it has only been a few hundred years since we fully realized it was a planet. We begin our study of objects in the Solar System with the Earth because it is interesting in its own right, and it provides a test of many observing techniques that we wish to use for other objects in the Solar System. Click here to go to homepage

Mars Mars, the "Red Planet", is named after the Roman god of war because it commonly appears with a reddish tinge when viewed in our sky. It has always held a fascination for those interested in the possibility of life on other planets. In 1895 a professor of astronomy, Samual Leland Phelps, wrote in a book called World Making that with a new 40 inch telescope being built by the University of Chicago Click here to go to homepage

Jupiter The planet Jupiter is shown in the adjacent Hubble Space Telescope true-color image (Ref). Jupiter is by far the largest of the planets. It is more than twice as massive as all other planets combined; if it had been only about 100 times more massive at birth (not so much by astronomical standards) it would have become a star instead of a planet. Then the Solar System might be a double star system instead of a single star with a planetary system. Click here to go to the homepage

Saturn Saturn, the second most massive planet, and the most distant planet known to the ancients, is one of the most beautiful sites in the Solar System, as witnessed by the adjacent image. The most striking feature of Saturn is the spectacular ring system. Although this feature is no longer unique, since we now know that all the Gas Giant planets have rings, the rings of Saturn are much more elaborate than those of any of the other planets. Click to go to the homepage

Uranus Uranus is largely hydrogen and helium, but (like Neptune) contains higher proportions of heavy elements than Jupiter or Saturn, and is covered with clouds. Our only direct spacecraft observation of Uranus came from Voyager 2 in Click to go to the homepage

Neptune Neptune is the eighth planet from the Sun and the fourth largest (by diameter). Neptune is smaller in diameter but larger in mass than Uranus Neptune has been visited by only one spacecraft, Voyager 2 on Aug Neptune's composition is probably similar to Uranus': various "ices" and rock with about 15% hydrogen and a little helium

Pluto Pluto (planet), ninth planet from the Sun and outermost known member of the solar system. Pluto was discovered as the result of a telescopic search inaugurated in 1905by American astronomer Percival Lowell, Pluto revolves about the Sun once in Earth years at an average distance of 5.9 billion km (3.67 billion mi) from the Sun. Pluto is about 2,320 km (1,440 mi) in diameter, about two-thirds the size of Earth's moon.