Uranus is tipped completely over — its axis lies almost in the plane of its orbit, so it rolls around the Sun like a ball, each pole spending 42 years in sunlight and 42 in darkness. It is an ice giant: a cold mantle of water, methane, and ammonia, with methane gas giving it its pale blue-green colour.

At magnitude 5.7 Uranus sits right at the edge of naked-eye visibility — from Zion’s dark skies you can just glimpse it as a faint star when you know exactly where to look. In binoculars it is easy; in a telescope it shows a tiny, distinctly non-stellar blue-green disc. It moves so slowly it lingers in the same constellation for years.