Puck is the tenth moon of the planet Uranus. This particular moon was named after a fairy who appeared in the Wiliam Shakespeare play " A Midsummer Night's Dream" (most of the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespearean characters).
Uranus' other twenty moons are Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, 1986U10, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, Caliban, Stephano, Sycorax, Prospero, and Setebos.
This moon was discovered on December 30, 1985 by Stephen Synnott (he found it by analyzing data from Voyager 2). Stephen was no stranger to the field of moon discovery, as he previously discovered both Metis and Thebe by analyzing data fom the original Voyager space probe. This moon was discovered quickly enough for the Voyager 2 probe to have its schedule adjusted to get images of it (all of the other new moons found via Voyager 2 were discovered too late to adjust the schedule to properly photograph them).
Puck is a small round moon that orbits very quickly around Uranus. It reflects very little light, and is very difficult to spot (which is why we never found it until Voyager 2 flew by). It has a fairly close orbit, (it is six times closer to Uranus than our own moon is to us), but is so small that it wouldn't make much a a visual effect even if you could observe it from close by.
- Equatorial radius 77 km
- Equatorial radius (Earth = 1) 1.2073e-02
- Mean distance from Uranus 86,010 km
- Orbital period 0.761832 days
- Mean orbital velocity 8.22 km/sec
- Orbital eccentricity 0.000
- Orbital inclination .31 degrees
- Visual geometric albedo 0.07
- Magnitude 20.2
You can view a picture of this moon at the following
url.
http://www.solarviews.com/raw/uranus/puck.gif