honeysuckle dreams

To Infinity and beyond!!!

What a spectacular night I had last night! I came home from work, around 8:30 and the first thing I noted when I stepped out of my car was how amazing the sky looked. Everything was so clear and my favorite constellation Orion was blazing, I had never seen him look so radiant. I walked into my house and the first thing I said to Steve was tonight is the perfect night to look for Saturn. Steve was lucky enough to have gotten a magnificient telescope for Christmas (see picture). His dad brought it up to our place a month or so ago and due to weather, time or any other random reason we hadn't gotten the chance to break it out and use it.

Oh boy, last night we did and what a site we got to see! A view of Saturn and its rings through a telescope is one of the most spectacular sights in the entire night sky. You never forget the first time you see it and I can happily say that was the second time for me. The first being back in Blacksburg when I took astronomy at Virginia Tech, there I got to see it with a bigger telescope but the feeling was still the same. I can't even begin to explain how it feels to see it, when you first glimpse it in your telescope you think you're seeing things. There is no way it looks exactly like the pictures in the book, there is no way I can see not only the planet but I can see its rings and the space between!! Its incredible!!

We had a lot of fun plotting the stars on a chart, finding the right location and getting the telescope on it. It was a little tricky since we're still getting the hang of using the telescope but when we finally found it and had it dead center in our eyepiece, we were richly rewarded for the hard work.

If you have never gotten to see Saturn through a telescope I highly suggest contacting your local astronomy club to find out about their next viewing night. It's worth the effort just to see Saturn through a telescope. We're going to go out again tonight and hope that Steve's father can join in the fun as well!! My next goal with Saturn is to one day see its moons, for that Steve and I will have to upgrade our lense and get a higher magnification. I can't wait until tonight to see it again and I cant help but think about the next planet we'll get to see.

I leave you with some fun facts about the planet Saturn:

General
-One of five "naked eye" planets known to the ancients. Saturn is named for the Roman god of agriculture, also linked to Kronos, Greek god of time, father of Jupiter and king of the gods. (The others are Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter)
-Yellowish color; at times the 3rd brightest planet in night sky

Physical Characteristics
-Second largest planet in the solar system, after Jupiter.
-Equatorial diameter 120,536 kilometers (74,898 miles) at cloud tops
-Polar diameter 108,728 kilometers (67,560 miles), making it the most oblate (flattened) planet.
-Density 0.69 (water = 1), the least dense planet and the only one lighter than water
-Volume 764 times that of Earth, but only 95 times more massive
-Chemical composition primarily hydrogen and helium, thus accounting for its low density

Orbit
-Sixth planet from the Sun, between Jupiter and Uranus
-Mean distance from Sun 1.43 billion kilometers (890 million miles), approximately 10 times the distance from Earth to the sun
-Brightness of sunlight at Saturn 1 percent of that at Earth
-Length of a Saturn year is 29.42 Earth years
-Length of a Saturn day is 10 hours, 39.4 minutes
-Poles tilted 29 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit around the Sun

Environment
-Saturn's atmosphere above clouds is approximately 94 percent hydrogen and 6 percent helium
-Winds near Saturn's equator blow toward east at 500 meters per second (1,100 miles per hour), making Saturn the windiest planet
-Temperature at Saturn's cloud tops -139 C (-218 F)

Previous Exploration
-Pioneer 11 flyby September 1, 1979
-Voyager 1 flyby November 12, 1980
-Voyager 2 flyby August 25, 1981

Rings
-Saturn's main ring system would barely fit in the space between Earth and its Moon
-Ring names are alphabetical in order of their discovery
-B ring often contains radial spokes of dust-sized material; their appearance changes with time as they appear, change and disappear frequently
-"Cassini Division" between the B ring and A ring is sparsely populated with ring material
-E ring is densest at the orbit of Enceladus and may be fed by Enceladus eruptions

Moons
-Saturn has 33 known moons, 15 of which were discovered after Cassini launched
-Titan is the largest of Saturn's moons, and is larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto

Posted by lilwolf at 9:48 AM