Crescent Neptune and Triton
Gliding silently through the outer Solar System , the Voyager 2 spacecraft camera captured Neptune and Triton together in crescent phase. The elegant picture of the ice-giant planet and its cloudy moon was taken from behind just after closest approach in 1989. It could not have been taken from Earth because Neptune never shows a crescent phase to sunward Earth. The unusual vantage point also robs Neptune of its familiar blue hue , as sunlight seen from here is scattered forward, and so is reddened like the setting Sun . Neptune is smaller but more massive than Uranus , has several dark rings , and emits more light than it receives from the Sun.