The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft is capturing magnificent images of Saturn. FILE/NASA

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft captured this image of Saturn's moon Enceladus, 62,000 miles above the unilluminated side of the planet's rings. FILE/NASA

Saturn, showpiece of the solar system

Date published: 2/7/2008

INCREDIBLE! WOW! Unbelievable! Those are a few of the comments I heard when people first saw the planet Saturn through the eyepiece of my telescope.

Of course, Saturn's great appeal comes from its magnificent ring system. Although rings also circle Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, Saturn's rings are the most vivid, intricate and beautiful in the solar system.

This month, Saturn is well placed for viewing as it lies in the opposite direction from the sun in our night sky. It will remain an easy object to spot throughout the spring and early summer this year.

Saturn is the second-largest planet in the solar system and was the outermost planet known to the ancients who did not possess any optical aids. It is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium and takes 29.5 years to complete one orbit around the sun. It boasts some of the fastest winds in the solar system, blowing at 1,000 miles per hour. The winds create the pastel-colored cloud bands on the planet visible with larger telescopes, but the cloud bands pale in comparison to the planet's magnificent ring system.

For all their beauty, Saturn's main rings are only about 33 feet thick according to the latest data from the ongoing Cassini-Huygens mission. The rings are composed mainly of ice in sizes as small as sand grains to as large as automobiles.

Although several rings are visible with the largest Earth-based telescopes, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft showed many more as they flew by Saturn in the 1980s. The Voyager encounters showed the rings are composed of thousands of separate ringlets, not unlike the grooves in old phonograph records, along with strange features resembling spokes in the rings not visible from Earth.

The Voyager missions opened a new chapter on Saturn in the 1980s, but a different mission named Cassini-Huygens is rewriting the Saturn textbooks for the new millennium.

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has continued where the Voyagers left off. Cassini-Huygens was launched in 1997 on a mission to Saturn and its largest moon, Titan, and has been taking magnificent photos and conducting detailed studies of the planet and its fascinating moons since it arrived in orbit around the planet in 2004.

Date published: 2/7/2008