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How was Miranda discovered?
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Uranus
Two views of the southern hemisphere of Uranus, produced from images obtained by Voyager 2 on Jan. 17, 1986. In colours visible to the unaided human eye, Uranus is a bland, nearly featureless sphere (left). In a colour-enhanced view processed to bring out low-contrast details, Uranus shows the banded cloud structure common to the four giant planets (right). From the polar perspective of Voyager at the time, the bands appear concentric around the planet's rotational axis, which is pointing nearly toward the Sun. Small ring-shaped features in the right image are artifacts arising from dust in the spacecraft's camera.
Miranda, the innermost and smallest of the five major moons of Uranus, was discovered in 1948 by the Dutch American astronomer Gerard Peter Kuiper. He identified the moon through the analysis of telescopic photographs of the Uranian system.21
Following its discovery, Kuiper named the moon after a character in William Shakespeareβs play The Tempest, continuing the tradition of naming Uranian moons after characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.21