Discovery of Ophelia

Ophelia is a small moon of Uranus, discovered on 20 January 1986 in images taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet. It orbits very close to Uranus, just inside the planet's outer epsilon ring, and with its neighbor Cordelia it acts as one of the shepherd moons that help confine the ring's narrow edges. Ophelia is only some fifteen kilometers in radius and appears as a dark, irregular body in the few images that exist. It is named after the daughter of Polonius in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, following the convention of naming Uranian moons after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

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