General Information

Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and its diameter is about 85% of Jupiter, the largest planet. Saturn is visible without a telescope and its existence was known by ancients. In 1610, Galileo peered at it through a telescope, but he was puzzled by its rings because he could not explain their geometry. Because of the resolution provided by his old-fashioned apparatus he could not explain what they were. Saturn's motion through our sky presents different angles of the rings, from an invisible edge-on appearance, to a much broader oval appearance when the rings are at maximum obliqueness. Saturn moves through these geometries every few years. It was Christiaan Huygens who infered in 1659 that a flat disc-shaped object would account for and explain the observations made by Galileo. The ring system of saturn was considered unique until 1977 when rings were discovered to exist around Uranus and later around all of the solar gas giants.