Interactive globe of the outer ice giant, rendered from Björn Jónsson's cylindrical map of Voyager 2 imaging from the August 1989 flyby — the only resolved cartography of Neptune that exists. The map is therefore an epoch: the Great Dark Spot it carries had vanished by the time Hubble looked in 1994, and Neptune's storms have appeared and dissolved on year timescales ever since. The 28.3° axial tilt, 16.11-hour System III rotation and oblateness are rendered; the faint rings are drawn at true radii, with the Adams ring's arcs — the feature that made Neptune's rings famous — marked at their resonance-confined location. The feed tracks a literature of JWST ring imaging, storm monitoring, and interior models reshaped by ice-giant convection work.
Neptune is marked in cyan on a live map of the uniquely named bodies of the solar system — planets, dwarf planets, and approximately 26,000 named minor planets and comets out to the Kuiper belt — together with the interstellar objects and the escaping spacecraft. Positions are evaluated at load time and each body links to its source record.
The sphere is rendered in Three.js at Neptune's equatorial radius, 24,764 km, scaled to scene units with the measured oblateness, the axis tilted 28.32°, and the idle rotation at the Voyager System III radio period of 16.108 hours. The base is Björn Jónsson's cylindrical assembly of Voyager 2 ISS imaging from the 25 August 1989 flyby, loaded from Maps/textures/neptune_color_2k.jpg. The same map underlies the Saturn page's northern hemisphere convention: where only one epoch of imaging exists, the page shows that epoch and says so.
Neptune's atmosphere does not hold still. The Great Dark Spot at −22° with its bright companion clouds, the fast 'Scooter', and the second dark spot DS2 are features of August 1989: Hubble found the Great Dark Spot gone by 1994, watched a northern counterpart form and dissipate in 2015–2018, and continues to track storms appearing on year timescales. The feature markers therefore carry their observation epoch in their records, and longitudes are nominal — storm longitudes drift relative to System III by design of the atmosphere, not of this page.
The five rings are drawn at their occultation- and Voyager-measured radii with opacities scaled to published normal optical depths — all of them faint, none approaching the Uranian ε ring. The Adams ring's arcs (Fraternité, Égalité, Liberté, Courage), dust concentrations confined near the 42:43 corotation resonance with Galatea, are marked as a ring-plane feature at 62,933 km; JWST imaging in 2022 recovered the full ring system for the first time since Voyager. The research panel queries body_server.py at /api/neptune/latest; absent a server, the seed research.json and ADS search links are used.