Saturn tips his hat and dives into the west

So beautiful! Moonlight turning the snow that draped the horizontal junipers to a cool shade of blue . . . Saturn, like an old man glancing back over his shoulder, tips his hat and dives into the west with Regulus and the rest of his pride in tow . . . wrapped in the solitude of this Christmas-card landscape, I perch high on my observing chair and suck in great gulps of deep, soothing tranquility, that rarest of elixirs.

It is perhaps 3:30 am; there are a few high, thin clouds drifting by; temperature is 26; my tea's still warm; and all's right with this world and perhaps beyond. Certainly all seemed well with Saturn, but that little "tip of the hat" strains our relationship just a tad. It starts me wondering just where am I and where is Saturn - and the answer takes awhile for me to tease out - it's all plane - or plain - geometry mixed with the majestic march of Saturn's orbit and our own. .

We can't see Saturn's rings as well as we could last year at this time. Last year the dark, Cassini Division was visible to the most casual glance with any decent scope. (It's especially obvious in the Hubble pictures as a black ring separating the others.) But this year I've had difficulty seeing the Cassini Division at all, though it teased me a bit this morning with just a hint that it was there. It all has to do with Saturn's tilt which - as with Earth's tilt - causes seasons.

To follow this you need to first make sure you have a good grasp of how the 23-degree tilt of the Earth's axis causes our seasons. If you're a little hazy on that, please go here. It's a terrific animation. Matter of fact, even if you're not hazy, take a look just to admire how well it's done!

Now back to Saturn. He's on a tilt as well - 27 degrees - and this means Saturn has seasons too. However, it takes Saturn about 29 years to make one trip around the Sun, so each season on Saturn is more than seven Earth years long.

Now consider that once a year or so Earth, in its much shorter orbit, overtakes Saturn. We did that yesterday, as a matter of fact. When we do, we look out at Saturn and how we see it depends on what season it is on Saturn. During one season the rings tilt one way from our perspective. Seven years later they are edge on to us. Then in another seven years they're tilted the other way. Seven more years and the cycle is complete - they're edge on again. Of course this happens gradually. But next year they're going to be edge on - roughly the way they were when Galileo turned his crude telescope towards the planet, which is one reason he had trouble detecting them. He saw something, but he wasn't sure just what it was.

And these rings are incredible. They vary in thickness from about 660 to 9,800 feet. That's about two miles max and since they stretch out over 180,000 miles, it's no wonder you can't see them when they are edge on. Think about this - it's very difficult with a small telescope to see a crater on the moon that's just two miles in diameter, and the moon is about 238,000 miles away. Saturn is more than 800 million miles from us.

Trying to get a grip on this kind of reality as I sit looking out over - or through - the scope is what makes my day, taking me away from the the kind of stuff that grinds us down most of the time. But, of course, it doesn't last. On this morning I was playing with two new eyepieces and trying to get a better feel for how my two small refractors work on the friction-driven alt-azimuth mount I'm using in the observatory right now. This is a sophisticated, low-tech approach, and what it meant was my gloves were off a lot; I was touching cold metal with bare hands a lot; and I was doing frustrating things like trying to attach bolts in the dimly lit observatory. I had a second pair of gloves in my vest pockets keeping warm, but after two hours my hands and feet were both trying to tell me to go back in the house. Still, I wanted a look at the Double Double using the 80 ED and using this new - to me - 3.2 mm Burgess TMB Planetary eyepiece. (TMB stands for Thomas M. Back, a renowned optical designer and amateur astronomer who died suddenly last fall.)

This is supposed to be an especially good - and inexpensive - eyepiece. Mine was just $45 for one that was new for all practical purposes. The eyepiece has a 60-degree apparent field of view, which is moderately wide, and the hype says it has very good contrast. And it does. It was giving me 187X - a bit much for this size scope -and a very pleasing, very clean split of this pair of double stars.

But what returned me unexpectedly to the ecstatic peace I had found a while earlier with Saturn, was my first attempt that morning to find the Double Double. It is over near Vega, one of the brightest stars, and I pointed the scope in that direction using a new 24mm Hyperion as the eyepiece. In this scope the Hyperion gave 25X and something approaching a 3-degree field of view. In any event, it captured, wonderfully, Vega, the Double Double, and a host of surrounding stars. It was a view I hadn't remembered seeing before - not with such crisp stars on a velvet-black sky, and for reasons I can't explain, it was one of those knee crumblers - the sort of thing that just makes you want to pause, and drop, and say thanks - thanks for allowing me to be here, thanks for letting me see this, thanks for . . . well, just thanks . . . the emotion goes beyond the words and defies a complete translation. No, this isn't about God - not in the usual sense. That word - God - has lost all its meaning for me. it has become a pejorative of sorts, what with bin Laden using it to justify his killing "us" and Bush and his enablers using it to justify their killing of "them," but I guess it's a cousin to that emotion and seems to be summed up nicely in the single word "grace."