Today I needed to come up with a list of great and unusual Neptune and Uranus photos to recommend to another space writer, and I figured that the best way to go about that was to write a blog entry!

I claim that despite the fact that Voyager 2 returned relatively few high-resolution images from either of those worlds, there are many more photos in the archives than regularly make it to public view. You can visit JPL's Planetary Photojournal to see all of these -- 48 press-released photos for Uranus and its moons, and 74 for Neptune and its moons. These contain classics such as this ultramarine-blue Neptune with its great dark spot and this much paler Uranus and its freakishly exaggerated "bull's eye" version. Together, those two images have resulted in the common depiction of Uranus as much lighter or paler (and often, as in this version by Calvin Hamilton, greener) than Neptune.

In fact, though, the two ice giants are near-twins, which you can see if you compare these two versions by Icelandic amateur image processor Björn Jónsson. At the time that Voyager 2 flew past, Uranus was grayer and less feature-rich than Neptune, but both shared the same serene methane-blue color.