Neptune cannot be seen from Earth by the unaided eye Even when viewed through a telescope it looks like a tiny blue dot as distant as the stars In fact Galileo saw Neptune through his small telescope almost 400 years ago but mistook it for a star Neptune was first identified as a planet in 1846 at the Berlin Observatory in Germany Later the planet was named Neptune after the Roman god of the sea
PLUTO NEPTUNE URANUS SATURN EARTH SUN JUPITER Neptune is the eighth major planet in the Solar System and takes 165 years to orbit the sun Pluto is a dwarf planet and takes almost 250 years to circle the sun But Pluto has an odd orbit that brings it closer to the sun than Neptune is for 20 out of every 250 years So between 1979 and 1999 Neptune was the outermost of the planets Neptune is about 2.8 billion miles from the sun 30 times farther away than planet Earth Like Jupiter Saturn and Uranus Neptune is a giant planet made up mostly of gases Neptune is about 30,000 miles across just a bit smaller than Uranus If Neptune were hollow about 42 Earths could fit inside
