2007 The Planets (Éire)
An Post, the Irish equivalent of Royal
Mail, released four stamps showing the outer planets of our
Solar System in 2007 May. Publicity material from An Post
referred to them enigmatically as “the first part of the
series of stamps which will be issued over a two-year period
during 2007/2008”. The Planets stamps were not linked to
any event or anniversary, although they took advantage of
Pluto’s demotion to the status of a dwarf planet the
previous year which reduced the number of major planets to an
even number of eight.
The four stamps came as two se-tenant pairs
and also on a mini-sheet, illustrated above. The 55c pair
featured Jupiter and Neptune, Jupiter being a Hubble Space
Telescope view from 1999 while the Neptune image was taken by
Voyager 2 in 1989.
The 78c pair showed Saturn as seen by HST
during the ring-plane crossing in 1995 November, along with an
enhanced-colour view of Uranus with pinkish cloud features (but
not its rings) taken by HST in 2003. At the centre of both
pairs is the Earth, obtained from NASA’s Visible Earth
website. The background to the mini sheet is part of an image
from the HST’s COSMOS survey made with the Advanced
Camera for Surveys (ACS).
An accompanying Prestige Booklet, written
by Professor David Fegan of the School of Physics at University
College Dublin, includes four stamp panes, each featuring the
four stamps on different backgrounds. The text, in English and
Irish, gives a brief introduction to the cosmos, followed by an
outline of planetary formation, a brief description of the
giant planets, and ends with a mention of extrasolar planets
and the possibility of life on them.
Stanley Gibbons nos. (to come)