Saturn is the outermost planet of the planets known in ancient times. The earliest known observations of Saturn, by the Babylonians, can be reliably dated to the mid-7th century BC, but it was probably noticed much earlier, since Saturn tends to shine brighter than most stars. To the naked eye it appears yellowish. The Greeks named it after Cronus, the original ruler of Olympus, who in Roman is the god Saturn.Saturn is the 6th planet in order distance from the sun. It cannot approach the planet Earth closer than 1,190,000,000 kilometers. Its brightness is due to its large size. Saturn’s equatorial diameter is 120,660 kilometers, but its globe is kind of flattened, and the polar diameter is only 108,000 kilometers. The mass of Saturn is 95.17 times that of the Earth, and the escape velocity, which is the velocity which once attained it will enable the object to “coast” away from the planet, is 32.26 kilometers per second, more than three times that of the Earth. Saturn’s outer layers are made up of gas, it is a world quite unlike our own.Saturn’s ring system is in a class of its own. While Jupiter and Uranus also have rings, those of Saturn are striking, and a telescope of moderate power will show them excellently. There can be no doubt that Saturn is one of the most beautiful objects in the sky.The first telescopic observations of Saturn have been made by Galileo in July 1610. He saw the disk of the planet clearly, but his telescope gave only a magnification of 32 diameters and that was not good enough to show the ring system in the way we know it nowadays. Galileo thought that Saturn must be a triple planet and wrote that “Saturn is not one alone, but is composed of three, which almost touch one another.” Two years later, he found to his surprise that the “companions” had vanished, so that Saturn appeared as a single object. The ring system was then edge-on to the Earth, and this ...
