Anniversary for the Planet Neptune!

Neptune doesn’t get much love.  It isn’t the biggest planet.  It doesn’t have cool rings.  It’s not the smallest.  Or the closest.  Or the fastest.  And H.G. Wells didn’t imagine conquers streaming from it’s surface.

In fact, you ask most people to offer some distinguishing feature about the planet.  They can’t.  It’s current dubious honor is being the most distant planet now that Pluto has been demoted to a “dwarf planet”.  Astronomers may like that.  No one else does.

But this week it gets a celebration nonetheless.  Because July 12, 2011 marks its first completion of a passage around the sun since it was first discovered in 1846.  Yup, it takes 164.79 earth years to go around the sun.

Happy Anniversary, Neptune? What are you going to do to celebrate?