Wrapping your mind around Saturn

Looking at Saturn last night, I thought about it in a new way – new to me, that is. I saw one end of the rings as touching the Earth, the opposite side as reaching two thirds of the way to the moon.

This is not an original thought – I just can’t remember where I read it. But it’s one that hit home with me, doing an excellent job of helping me appreciate the dimension of what I was seeing. I haven’t been to the Moon, of course, but I do know it would take me about 20 days in a typical commercial jet to cover the 238,000 miles to the moon. The point is, these are some numbers I can relate to my experience and so make a little sense of. Now, also knowing that what I am looking at is trillions of tiny ice cubes – most closer to being crushed ice rather than cubes – a few being closer to the size of an ice house – well, that’s another matter.

In speaking of matter, one of my favorite facts is Saturn itself is a huge ice cube that would float if we had an ocean large enough to hold it. Oh – and we could fit close to 800 planest the size of Earth inside it. Can you really imagine that? When you look intot he telescope, can you see yourself approaching this object in a spacecraft?

Mind you, Saturn and its rings in the LX90 at about 240X was taking up perhaps one sixteenth of the field of view. That is, place about 16 of them side by side and they would reach from one side of the eyepiece to the other. In other words, though bright, Saturn is still quite small from our perspective. Technically, the planet itself was covering about 19 seconds of arc.

So here I am in my spacecraft approaching from just outside the rings. All I can think of is the scene in the first Star Trek movie where they seem to cruise around the Enterprise in a Shuttlecraft forever – making the point of how big it was. But next to staurn it was nothing.

But, while I find these dimension difficult to really internalize, I am confident that if I keep trying it will get closer and closer to grasping them. That;s one thing I like about looking at solar system objects. You do have a prayer of getting your mind around what it is you are seeing.

One more note which has little to do with the preceding – I could see Titan and Rhea. But the combination of poor transparency and a 6-day old moon a short distance away made it impossible for me to detect the other three moons we commonly see. Titan , of ourse, is the brightest and always easy to see. At Mag 9.7 Rhea comes next, with the others being a magnitude or more fainter and closer to the planet last night.

Oh – and speaking of the moons, I really like this NASA page which describes each. The ones we usually see in our scopes are Titan, Rhea, Tethys, Dione, and Enceladus. Go to the page and click on thios and you will get many more interesting details. As far as I’m concerned, the large moons of our solar system are simply fascinating – but they didn’t become so until we started sending space probes to them and learning how distinctly unusual each is.