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The Lord of the Rings
The Solar System >
One special night when I was a kid, back in the late sixties I hate to admit, I was in my backyard and spotted a bright object in the western skies, about halfway up from the horizon. That's one bright star, I thought, and figured there was no better time than now to break out my Sears 3-inch refractor telescope, with special solar filter adapter I'll have you know.
I set it up and picked what I was hoping would be a good eyepiece. I finally got that bright star centered in my finder scope, now confident it would be waiting for me in the eyepiece. I crammed my eye into that cheap .975-inch eyepiece, turned the focus knob, and…
And what I saw has stuck in my memory ever since.
It was no star in my eyepiece that night; it was a planet - a ringed planet. I had unwittingly discovered for myself the planet Saturn. I will never forget that event. It's been four decades since and still I am awed at the grandeur of that orb, even seen through an amateur backyard telescope.
You can now enjoy Saturn's beauty - you and your family - as it's now rising in the east right after the sun sets in the west.
We have just passed Saturn's "opposition," the point in our combined orbits when Saturn is opposite in the sky compared to our Sun, we are right between the two. This is a good time for us who like observing the Lord of the Rings seeing as it's as close and big as it's going to get this year. And it is fully lit.
Take your family out and with even a cheap department store scope (opt for a better one if one is available) find the great planet and take a look. Let it rise in the sky higher off the horizon to avoid the heat waves. See if you can see Saturn's faint golden color, or even the subtle east-west cloud patterns.
And of course admire the rings, those magnificent rings sweeping full around on both sides. A decent scope will be able to show you the Cassini division, a "gap" in the rings first discovered in 1675 by Giovanni Cassini.
Thankfully, Saturn is in a position in its orbit where, from our point of view, the rings are tilted up about 15 degrees. Some readers may remember back in 1995/96 when our view of Saturn's rings was edge-on. They had, for all intents and purposes, vanished. They are that thin.
Not this year, though! They are there in all their glory. Go and behold.
Come back a year from now and look at the exact same part of the sky and you'll notice something missing. That would be Saturn. Unlike the so-called "fixed" stars above - heavenly bodies that are there predictably, year after year - those wily planets move.
Saturn orbits around the sun in about 29 of our years. It's a pokey pace but that rate guarantees that by the time we catch up with it again next year it will have moved over to the west nearly 15 degrees, surrounded by a different ménage of stars.
But there is no rush to see The Ringed One. It will continue to grace our sky until June-ish. Please, though, do try and get outside sometime between now and then and take a look at it. Take your kids, too. It may impact them the way it impacted me many moons ago.
Posted by Mark Ritter at 2007.02.18 02:04 PM | Comments (0)
