Neptune, all night

25 years ago tonight, Voyager 2 made its closest pass by Neptune, zipping over the cloudtops at Neptune’s north pole at a distance of barely 17,000 miles. That’s a close shave by space probe standards. And make no mistake, Voyager had spent the past month or so showing us amazing things.

PBS took advantage of the overnight timeframe of these final encounters of Voyager 2’s career, cooking up a round-the-clock stew of commentary (some of it, admittedly, barely related) to fill in between JPL’s hourly-and-then-half-hourly updates as the closest encounter approached. Scientsts were talked to, science fiction authors and Firesign Theatre characters were invited on, barely-relevant music was played, and it was just freakin’ magical. Fueled by Dr. Pepper and more Dr. Pepper, I stayed up for 30 hours on the last weekend before my senior year of high school started, just to take it all in.

The real icing on the cake was the sadly short sequence of photos taken as Voyager 2 zoomed past Triton, Neptune’s large moon. One of the largest natural satellites in the solar system, Triton is in a retrograde orbit around Neptune – orbiting in a direction opposite to the planet’s rotation and the orbits of the rest of its moons – and Voyager had mere minutes to take the only photos of Triton that most of us will ever get to see. (For context: no other Neptune missions are on the drawing board. For my generation… this was it. This was our look. And I knew it.)

The pictures that came back were unexpectedly spectacular; an icy ball of rock with craters was expected. An oddly-textured body with live cryovolcanoes erupting before the eye of Voyager 2’s camera was not expected. Here, then, is the entire sequence of Triton photos – even blurry ones.

The Voyager 2 team discovered whole new moons prior to the closest pass to the planet, including 1989n1 (later named Proteus)…

…and somewhat more distant 1989n2 (Larissa).

There are a few specimens of Neptune All Night on YouTube, and the open especially was one of the things that grabbed me – maybe it was edited by someone who just grabbed any space news archive footage he could find. Or maybe it was edited by someone who actually grokked that this was the latest great human endeavour in space.

And here’s Firesign Theatre mainstay George Leroy Tirebiter, commenting on the just-arrived photos of Triton. Because who else are you going to ask to comment on that?

Sadly, any hopes of a better look at Nereid, the other moon of Neptune known to exist prior to Voyager’s arrival, were dashed by sheer distance. Here is the best shot of Nereid obtained by Voyager 2.

New Horizons will be visiting Pluto in 2015, and I may yet stay up 30 hours again just to be one of the first to see it. Sure, prettier, processed pictures will be all over the web later… but there’s nothing quite like being there. Even if I’m still being here.

25 years ago tonight, I stayed up for over a day just to see Neptune. I’d do it all again.