Those who missed "Weather Eye" yesterday missed a lot of Neptunes. There was Neptune the Roman god, Neptune the ship, and Neptune the statue, soon to appear on the shores of Dublin Bay.
But there is another Neptune many miles away, a blue planet about 30 times farther from the Sun than we are.
Neptune, the planet, is four times larger than Earth. Its diameter is some 30,000 miles, and it rotates on its axis very rapidly, completing a revolution about every 16 hours. It moves in an almost circular orbit 3,000 million miles from the sun. It takes 164 years to complete a single journey.
Because it appeared to have a bluish tinge, this latest addition to the solar system, when it was discovered in 1846, was called after the sea god. But the choice of name was not unanimous.
The French wanted to call it "Leverrier", after the Frenchman who predicted its existence. But their English colleagues disagreed: "Mythology is neutral ground," said one. "And besides, just think how awkward it would be if the next planet should be discovered by a German, by a Bugge, a Funk, or by our hirsute friend, young Boguslawski."
Neptune's weather is difficult to define. The giant planet has no solid surface as we know it. It consists, as far as we know, of a rocky core at a temperature of about 7,000 C; the outer parts of this core mix with the lower regions of a vast, liquid ocean to form a mud sea, and the ocean itself peters out gradually into an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium with a trace of methane.
Being so far from the sun, Neptune gets very little solar heat. Temperatures in the outer reaches of its atmosphere range from -150 to 200 C. The atmosphere itself is punctuated by several dark areas, one of which, the Great Dark Spot, is large enough to contain Earth. This giant storm rotates anti-clockwise like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, and its periphery is decorated by a ring of high cirrus clouds of frozen methane.
But perhaps the strangest feature of Neptune's hyperactive weather is the wind. Gales often approaching 1,000 m.p.h. sweep constantly round the planet, making it the windiest spot in the entire solar system.
And unlike our earthly winds, which are driven by the energy streaming towards us from the sun, Neptunian winds are largely powered by the intense heat from the planet's core.