Fact Sheet
Neptunian Discovery
Gerard Kuiper discovered the second known moon of the planet Neptune on May 1, 1949. Kuiper, who was director of both McDonald and Yerkes observatories, made the discovery with McDonald's 82-inch telescope. The best view of Nereid came from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989. Even its best images, though, showed only a small, fuzzy blob of lights. [McDonald Observatory (2); NASA/JPL]
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