Discovery of Puck

Puck is the largest of the small inner moons of Uranus and was found in images sent back by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it approached the planet in the winter of 1985 to 1986. The discovery was made by Stephen Synnott, who identified the faint moving point in the photographs. Puck is roughly 160 kilometres across, a dark, heavily cratered and roughly spherical body that orbits between the smaller inner moons and the larger Miranda. It is named after the mischievous sprite in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, following the convention of naming Uranian moons after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

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