Introduction to The Nine Planets

   The Nine Planets is a collection of information about our Solar System intended for a general audience with little technical background. No special expertise or knowledge is needed; all technical and astronomical terms and proper names are defined in the glossary.

   This document consists of about 90 WWW "pages", one page for each major body in the Solar System. Each page has:

• a large picture of its object and usually several smaller thumbnail images (all linked to their full-size originals)
• some scientific and historical facts about it,
• if the object has satellites then its page has a table of data on them and links to their pages, and
• a list of open issues for which we as yet have no answers.

   To truly justify the title of "Multimedia Tour", I've also included:

• short sound clips from Holst's The Planets (about 10 seconds or 180k each) for seven of the planets;
• sound clips of my mellifluous voice pronouncing some of the more unusual names;
• links to "movies" of a few objects.

   I've chosen ten of the most interesting bodies and linked them into an Express Tour. If you don't have time for the full tour, don't miss these.

Hints

Many of the images here will look much better if your system uses at least 16 bits per pixel.

Use Netscape as your browser if you can, as it will display items without helper programmes being needed.

Without the efforts of all the scientists and engineers at NASA and JPL this tour would not be possible.

Where to go next

The full tour continues with the Overview (or if you're in a hurry take the Express Tour). The names at the bottom of each page provide access to the next world in the full tour and a few other related pages; the icons provide access to the table of contents, the page of detailed data and this site's "home page".

If you haven't already, please switch to the mirror site closest to you.

... Introduction ... Overview ... Sun ...