was found that the occultation was due to the small Neptunian moon Larissa, a highly unusual event. In the 1980s, significant occultations were much rarer for Neptune than for Uranus, which lay near the Milky Way at the time and was thus moving against a denser field of stars. Neptune's next occultation, on 12 September 1983, resulted in a possible detection of a ring. However, ground-based results were inconclusive. Over the next six years, approximately 50 other occultations were observed with only about one-third of them yielding positive results. Something (probably incomplete arcs) definitely existed around Neptune, but the features of the ring system remained a mystery. The Voyager 2 spacecraft made the definitive discovery of the Neptunian rings during its fly-by of Neptune in 1989, passing by as close as above the planet's atmosphere on 25 August. It confirmed that occasional occultation events observed before were indeed caused by the arcs within the Adams ring (see below). After the Voyager fly-by the previous terrestrial occultation observations were reanalyzed yielding features of the ring's arcs as they were in 1980s, which matched those found by Voyager 2 almost perfectly. Since Voyager 2s fly-by, the brightest rings (Adams and Le Verrier) have been imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-based telescopes, owing to advances in resolution and light-gathering power. They are visible, slightly above background noise levels, at methane-absorbed wavelengths in which the glare from Neptune is significantly reduced. The fainter rings are still far below the visibility threshold for these instruments. In 2022 the rings were imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope, which made the first observation of the fainter rings since the Voyager 2s fly-by. General properties Neptune possesses five distinct rings named, in order of increasing distance from the planet, Galle, Le Verrier, Lassell, Arago and Adams. In addition to these well-defined rings, Neptune may also possess an extremely faint sheet of material stretching inward from the Le Verrier to the Galle ring, and possibly farther in toward the planet. Three of the Neptunian rings are narrow, with widths of about 100 km or less; in contrast, the Galle and Lassell rings are broad—their widths are between 2,000 and 5,000 km. The Adams ring consists of five bright arcs embedded in a fainter continuous ring. Proceeding counterclockwise, the arcs are: Fraternité, Égalité 1 and 2, Liberté, and Courage. The first three names come from "liberty, equality,