Saturn’s rings today
The rings stay level while Saturn carries them round the Sun, so from Earth we see them open, close and vanish edge-on about every fifteen years. Drag Saturn sideways to wind the years. Go on, make them vanish.
- How we see the rings
- Doing the sums
- Next time they turn edge-on to Earth
- Looking
- For a few days around that date the rings all but vanish in a telescope.
- Width of the rings on the sky
Celestial north is at the top. The tilt, the squashed shape of the planet and both shadows (the planet’s on the rings and the rings’ on the planet) are calculated for the site clock’s time. The colours of the rings come from a Cassini photograph; how see-through each part is I estimated from its brightness. That is a guess, not measured data. A confession: my rings are equally bright from every angle. The real ones are not. I’m working on it. The planet’s belts are read, latitude by latitude, from a Hubble photograph taken in October 1997, so they are the same all the way round and show no storms; the parts that photograph did not show (the strip behind the rings, and the far north) are copied from the same latitude in the other hemisphere. See where the ring picture comes from