“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to
anybody.” -Mark Twain Back before the telescope was invented,
Saturn was known as the Old Man of the Skies. The slowest-moving
of the naked-eye planets, it’s the only one that would reliably
be in nearly the same location, year after year. You can find it
all summer, after sunset, by following the “arc” of the handle
of the big dipper all the way until you run into the brightest
northern-hemisphere star, Arcturus, and then speeding on to the
very bright Spica. Saturn is right next door. But everything got
an awful lot more interesting once the telescope was developed.
What was a bright, slowly moving point of light for all of
humanity suddenly transformed into the ringed wonder we know
today. Saturn, as you know, has the most complex and spectacular
ring system of any planet discovered so far. While you can see
the ringed structure even through a good pair of binoculars, the
best views come from NASA’s Cassini mission, presently orbiting
the rin