World

Triton

Triton is Neptune’s biggest moon; it orbits backwards and is probably a captured Kuiper Belt object, about 2 705 km across.

Key facts

Diameter

2 705 km

Goes round

Neptune

See it from here

Not by eye or binoculars: Triton is magnitude 13.5, about 600 times fainter than the faintest star you can see, so it takes a telescope.

How the map draws it

Its colours come from orange, green and blue pictures, balanced to its published colour and toned down toward what an eye would see · Voyager 2 photographed part of it in 1989; the rest is left plain, not guessed · lit as a camera exposed for its own sunlight would show it · seen from far off it is a light at its computed brightness: the glow is how a camera records a point too bright to resolve.