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Saturn is the telescopic showpiece of the night sky, thanks to its great ring system in all of their icy, glimmering elegance. In small telescopes, they surprise even veteran observers with their chilling beauty even though it is expected. Certainly they will delight anyone this winter who received a telescope as a holiday gift. Any telescope magnifying more than 30-power will show them.
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Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the first to view the rings in 1610 although what he saw through his crude telescope left him completely baffled; his crude, imperfect “optick tube” revealed Saturn as having an odd pair of appendages or companion bodies on either side. He couldn’t make them out clearly and thought that Saturn was a triple body, two small orbs on either side of a large one.
Galileo announced this discovery in 1610 with an anagram written in Latin. The jumbled letters could be transposed to read: Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (“I have observed the highest planet to be triple.”) Later, when the rings turned edgewise to Earth and the two companions disappeared, Galileo invoked an ancient myth when he wrote, “Has Saturn swallowed his children?” Galileo lamented that his mind was too weak to comprehend this strange phenomenon.
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