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Madison Metropolitan School District

Instructional Resources

Planets: True Colors

It's difficult to find a good collection of photographs which show the true or natural color of each of the planets. Here are some we've created.

The Planetary Society has a great website describing why the true colors of the planets color aren't what you think.

How many moons? (Moon Count)

Teachers, are you having trouble keeping track of the number of moons for each planet? With improvements in technology, discoveries of more and more of the smaller moons have been coming in. Now they are detecting these objects down to only a couple of kilometers in diameter. So how small can these objects be and still be called a "moon"? There is no clear answer, because there is no clean cut-off for the size an object has to be in order to be called a moon. If you want to be safe, you can call them all natural satellites, but it's still okay to call them moons.

Here are the latest numbers. We will update them as new moons are found. Numbers between sources may vary. However these numbers are the generally accepted ones.

Planet Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto
# moons 00 00 01 02 95 146 28 16 05

Links to great sources of information about moons (natural satellites) in the solar system below.

Recent Updates:  Links for up-to-date information on moons (natural satellites)

Activities Designed by MMSD Planetarium

Other Instructional Resources