In our culture where publicity and “hard sell” are routine, it’s always tempting to exaggerate. But one planet never disappoints. Through any telescope with more than 30x, Saturn elicits gasps. Oddly enough, photos of the ringed world do not pack the same punch. You have to see it for yourself.
This is the time. This weekend, Saturn comes nearest to us for the entire year, and it will remain close, big and bright all this summer and fall. Those fabled rings, which have been oriented with an ideal slant for the past six years, are now starting to tilt a bit closer to edgewise, giving them a stunning appearance. Any backyard telescope will show detail like the inky black gap that separates the narrower darker outer ring from the broad white inner one.
It’s called The Cassini division, named after Giovanni Cassini who discovered it in 1675 when he used an ordinary refracting telescope whose 2 ½ inch-wide main lens is a near-perfect match for the commonest inexpensive instrument used by backyard sky-explorers today.
Those rings are fashioned of countless chunks of ordinary water ice, each typically the size of a beach ball. The rings span 100,000 miles across but are only about 35 feet thick. That’s so thin, it’s analogous to a sheet of paper the size of a city block. That’s why they can vanish entirely when seen edgewise, like they will in March of 2025.
The hemisphere being tilted our way since 2009 — and continuing for 15 years — is the north face, the one whose pole is surrounded by a mysterious hexagon 60 miles high, which could enclose five planet Earths.
Saturn’s always been weird. Its great distance from the Sun gives it the slowest motion of any of the bright planets, and the ancients thought its lengthy 29 ½ year orbit meant it was lethargic, and created the word saturnine to describe someone gloomy and morose. Telescopes first pointing its way in 1609 barely helped clarify the nature of this giant icy ball. Even when Galileo used his best home-made telescope with its 30x magnification, he did not perceive it as a ball surrounded by unattached rings, a spectacle that appears nowhere on Earth. Instead, he saw the bright protrusions on each side of Saturn as the handles of a teacup, and sketched them that way. Unsurprisingly, a giant floating teacup did not add clarification to our planetary studies, especially a porcelain item weighing 90 times more than Earth.
To find Saturn for yourself the next clear night, start the water boiling for some tea, and while waiting, venture out any time after 10 p.m. Look low in the southeast. You’ll see a very bright star down low, the most brilliant in the whole sky. This is Jupiter. Directly to its right is the only other bright star in this region, and this is Saturn. Saturn’s only 1/7th as bright as Jupiter, so expect a bright but not a brilliant “star.” It seems a dot, like a star. Only a telescope will convert it into something truly amazing, a sight that makes most people cry out, “That’s not real!” or else, “Oh, my God!”
I’ve watched thousands get their first Saturnian gaze over the past half century. “Oh my God!” and “That’s not real!” are somehow the reliable repetitious chants that you’ll hear. But now, and throughout the summer, why not check all this out for yourself?
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