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The Nine Planets is a collection of information about our Solar System intended for a general audience with little technical background. No special expertise or knowledge is needed; all technical and astronomical terms and proper names are defined in the glossary. The bulk of this material should be familiar to planetary scientists and astronomers but they may find a few interesting tidbits, too.
This site consists of about 100 pages, one page for each major body in the Solar System. Each page has:
a large picture of its object and usually several smaller thumbnail images (all linked to their full-size originals)
some scientific and historical facts about it,
if the object has satellites then its page has a table of data on them and links to their pages,
links to more images and information about the object elsewhere on the Web, and
a list of open issues for which we as yet have no answers.
To truly justify the title of "Multimedia Tour", I've also included:
short sound clips from Holst's The Planets (about 10 seconds or 180k each) for seven of the planets;
sound clips of my mellifluous voice pronouncing some of the more unusual names;
links to "movies" of a few objects.
There are also a few miscellaneous pages: on planetary science spacecraft, the glossary, a list of some of the planetary images available elsewhere on the Net, some bits of history, several pages of data and a special plea for your support of the space program.
The pages of this document are organized in a hierarchy based on the primary-satellite relationship. In addition, there are many hyperlinks enabling the interactive viewer to jump around and view the pages in many ways. If you "get lost" you can always jump back to the table of contents by clicking the NinePlanets icon at the bottom left of each page. And many pages have a Google search box where you can search for keywords in this site (or the whole web).
At the bottom of each page is a set of links to other related pages. To visit the next body in an ordered traversal of the solar system choose the link immediately to the right of the name of the current page. You can also go back to the previous page, the "parent" page, the table of contents or to the detailed data page.
I've chosen ten of the most interesting bodies and linked them into an Express Tour. If you don't have time for the full tour, don't miss these.
And if you want to read offline or just explore in more depth, visit The Nine Planets Bookstore or the "Hardcopy" links found at the right side of some pages