Interactive globe of the first ice giant. Uranus has no imaged global map: Voyager 2 in January 1986 saw an almost featureless disk, so the base here is a synthesized zonal-brightness profile — latitude structure from Voyager 2 and Hubble photometry painted at the planet's measured colour, with no invented storms or detail. What is real is rendered exactly: the 97.77° axial tilt that rolls the planet onto its side, the retrograde 17.24-hour rotation, the oblateness, and the thirteen narrow rings drawn at their true radii with the ε ring dominant. Ring and atmospheric-band features are selectable, and the research feed tracks a literature now dominated by the Uranus Orbiter & Probe, the decadal survey's top-priority flagship.
Uranus 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 Uranus's equatorial radius, 25,559 km, scaled to scene units, with the measured oblateness applied. The axis is tilted 97.77° in the scene, so the planet spins nearly pole-on to its orbit — the configuration responsible for its 42-year polar seasons — and the idle rotation is retrograde with the measured 17.24-hour period.
Uranus is the one world in this catalog with no imaged global map: Voyager 2's single flyby (24 January 1986) recorded an almost featureless disk, and no mission has returned. The Worlds admission rule is an evidence-led globe, so the base texture is built to carry exactly the evidence that exists and nothing more: a one-dimensional zonal-brightness profile — the bright south-polar collar near −45°, the darker low southern latitudes, and the post-equinox north-polar brightening tracked by Hubble — painted at the planet's measured mean colour. It is uniform in longitude by construction. No storms, bands or texture are invented. When the Uranus Orbiter & Probe returns real cartography, this layer is replaced.
The rings are a single annulus mesh with UVs remapped radially, textured from the ring table rather than an image: each of the nine main rings (6, 5, 4, α, β, η, γ, δ, ε) plus ζ is drawn at its occultation-measured radius, with opacity scaled to published normal optical depths. The ε ring — 51,149 km, eccentric, 20–96 km wide — dominates, as it does in every observation since the 1977 occultation discovery. Ring features are placed in the ring plane at true radii; atmospheric features are placed by latitude with nominal longitudes, since no longitude system on Uranus is observable.
The research panel queries body_server.py at /api/uranus/latest; absent a server, the seed research.json and ADS search links are used. The engine, server and data schema are shared with the other Worlds globes.