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Saturn: Catch the rings while you still can |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Saturday, 23 February 2008
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 Our solar system's Lord of the Rings is strutting its stuff right now. Saturn is so delightfully angled towards Earth that we can see its beautiful ring system in all its icy glory. But be sure to take a look now, for just like Earth, Saturn's axis and orbit will angle take the rings to an angle where we won't get such picture perfect views.
Anybody with a magnitude 30 or so telescope should be able to easily distinguish Saturn's rings. The view is afforded to us by unique positioning directly placing the Earth between Saturn and the Sun. Right now, we're looking at the rings at about an 8 degree angle, and by May the angle will have increased to 10 degrees. Unfortunately from there, it's only going to go down. By the summer of 2009 we won't even be able to see the rings, as we'll be looking at them edge-on.
Though the rings of Saturn stretch over 250,000 miles across, they are just one mile thick, and at our closest we can view them from 790,000,000 miles away. That is the equivalent of looking at a piece of paper edge-on from 49 miles away.
Though Saturn was first discovered by Galileo Galiei in 1610, it wasn't until 1655 that Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens and his better telescope discovered that the weird dissapearing companions to Saturn were actually rings, and that they tilted into and out of view. Since then, we have launched four missions to the ringed planet: a flyby by Pioneer 11 in 1979, the Voyager probes in 1980 and 1981, and now the orbiting Cassini probe since 2004.
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"Excelsior? Why in God's name would you want that bucket of bolts?"
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