How much do you know about Uranus? Maybe less than you think. But this old Geocities website is at hand to teach you more about Uranus in case anyone asks. Here are a few snippets:
> Nearly 200 years after its discovery, in 1977, astronomers discovered that Uranus has a system of rings around it. They are too faint to be seen directly from Earth, even with a powerful telescope but, in 1977, Uranus’ path through the sky took it directly in front of a star. The starlight was observed to dim and brighten again several times before the star disappeared behind the planet. The same thing happened just after the star reappeared. A set of rings around Uranus was the only sensible explanation. The existence of eleven seperate rings was confirmed when Voyager 2 passed only 46,600 miles (75,000 km) away from Uranus in 1986. They are made of pieces of rock as dark as coal.
> The axis Uranus spins around is tilted right over to lie nearly the main plane of the Solar System. This makes Uranus unique among the planets: all the others spin with their axes at right angles to their orbits, or not too far off. Uranus appears to roll around on its side as it orbits the Sun, with its spin axis pointing towards the Sun. This means that one half of Uranus faces the Sun for many Earth years. Days and nights are 42 Earth years long on some parts of the planet.