When I was a teen, I joined an urban astronomy club at my school. It wasn鈥檛 popular: most nights, it was just me and a physics teacher standing on a Chicago street corner haranguing passersby to look through our telescope. In hindsight, it is a wonder my parents agreed to this, but it was one of the first things that really fed my love of space.
One night, another teacher joined us. He brought along an old-fashioned refractor telescope, the long kind. It looked much more impressive than our usual small telescope, so a crowd gathered as he pointed it at Saturn. This month, like that one, is an excellent time to see this planet in the sky, which is why I am telling you this story.
When you view Saturn through a telescope, your first instinct will be that it can鈥檛 be real. Someone must have slapped a sticker on the lens as a prank, because Saturn can鈥檛 possibly look like that from billions of kilometres away. When I peered through that old-fashioned telescope, I saw a perfect, crisp outline of a planet encircled by a thick band of rings. There was even a visible gap between the rings and the planet. It made Saturn feel real in a way that it never had been before.
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I almost think that, up close, Saturn would feel less real than it does from here. From Earth, its rings look like a solid block of material, but in reality they are made of countless tiny particles hurtling around the planet in concert, almost entirely made of water ice. They are less than a kilometre thick, which is wild when you consider that Saturn is about 120,000 kilometres across, nearly 10 times wider than Earth. And they aren鈥檛 a single disc like a CD, but rather a series of nested bands with gaps between them, often shepherded by small moons that act a bit like cosmic robot vacuum cleaners as they orbit through the rings.
Of course, you can鈥檛 see all that from Earth, but Saturn astonished teenage me, and maybe it will astonish you too. In October and November, Saturn will be visible just after sunset, in the south-eastern sky across from the setting sun in the northern hemisphere. It will rise through the southern sky and then set in the west in the wee hours of the morning. You can see it in the southern hemisphere too, looking north-west.
With the naked eye, Saturn will just look like a dot. But if you have a decent telescope, or if there is an astronomy club in your area, you might see the clear outline of the rings. Maybe it will inspire you to love space just like it inspired me.
Now that I think about it, this column is a bit like my school club, except I am writing instead of shouting 鈥淗ey, who wants to look at Saturn?鈥� on a street corner. I will be taking over this column for around a year, so I鈥檒l be back next month to yell at you about space some more! I can鈥檛 wait.
Leah Crane is a features editor聽at New Scientist based聽in Chicago
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