APOD 3.6

For today's APOD we have a picture of Saturn. If this is Saturn, you may ask, where are the rings? Well, the thin blue line that runs horizontally across the picture is the rings. The Cassini spacecraft that is orbiting the ringed planet crosses the ring plane frequently, so these kinds of photographs are not too rare. A photograph of this same thing that may be rare, is one where the Earth crosses the Saturn's ring plane. In 1612, when this happened, the planet's "appendages" just appeared to just disappear. Even the great astronomer Galileo had no idea what happened to the peculiar protrusions we now know are rings. The rings are so thin (besides the moons that appear as blue bumps in the rings in the picture) that when they are seen edge on, they can not be seen. They are confined to a plane much thinner that of a razor blade, which is in part why I chose this photograph. It amazes me how thin the rings of Saturn actually are. I first thought that the rings were made up much larger material, maybe the size of baseballs. But it turns out that I was very wrong.