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Description
“I came to understand that, inasmuch as the circuit of Saturn and the adhering bodies was so short, this could happen under no other condition than that the globe of Saturn were assumed to be surrounded equally on all sides by another body, and that thus a kind of ring encircled it about the middle; for so, with whatever velocity it revolved, it would always present the same aspect to us, if, of course, its axis were perpendicular to the plane of the ring.”
– Cristian Huygens, Systema Saturnium.

The rings of Saturn can be seen with a normal set of binoculars.
But only if you are willing to stare at the planet for a long time, and you know what you are looking for.
And therein lies the rub.

Those rings has confounded onlookers from the very start.
The fact of the matter is, that the whole concept is less logical than one would think.
It makes perfect sense only when you know of it to begin with.

As Galileo Galilei turned his telescope toward Saturn, he initially viewed it not as a single disk, but as tree stars lying right next to each other.
(The whole star- description isn’t so surprising. Some of the brighter stars in our sky is after all still planets, the ancient Greeks called them “wanderers” - planetes as they wandered across the sky rather than mowing slowly together with the other stars. Anyway, lets return to the topic at hand...)
Then, as the shape and placement of these tree stars remained the same no matter when one looked at them, it became clear to the old master that Saturn must have some sort of “appendages” sticking out of it.

Many different attempts were made at mapping these out.
Some of them more “ring like” than others.

Until Huygens concluded that as a planet revolves around its own axis, and any satellites (read moons) revolving around them will generally be seen to change place from one observation to another, the only way in which the “appendages” could be visible at every single observation was if they were in fact not appendages, but a ring.
Otherwise, they, or Saturn, or both would have had to “spin” impossibly quickly.

A realisation which he himself says could not have been possible had he not also seen one of Saturn’s moons.
He assures that earlier observers, and thinkers are completely justified in not having realised this.
That is how initially impossible any notion of a ring formation was even to him.

Today of course, we know all the outer planets, from Jupiter and out to have rings.

Description
“I came to understand that, inasmuch as the circuit of Saturn and the adhering bodies was so short, this could happen under no other condition than that the globe of Saturn were assumed to be surrounded equally on all sides by another body, and that thus a kind of ring encircled it about the middle; for so, with whatever velocity it revolved, it would always present the same aspect to us, if, of course, its axis were perpendicular to the plane of the ring.”
– Cristian Huygens, Systema Saturnium.

The rings of Saturn can be seen with a normal set of binoculars.
But only if you are willing to stare at the planet for a long time, and you know what you are looking for.
And therein lies the rub.

Those rings has confounded onlookers from the very start.
The fact of the matter is, that the whole concept is less logical than one would think.
It makes perfect sense only when you know of it to begin with.

As Galileo Galilei turned his telescope toward Saturn, he initially viewed it not as a single disk, but as tree stars lying right next to each other.
(The whole star- description isn’t so surprising. Some of the brighter stars in our sky is after all still planets, the ancient Greeks called them “wanderers” - planetes as they wandered across the sky rather than mowing slowly together with the other stars. Anyway, lets return to the topic at hand...)
Then, as the shape and placement of these tree stars remained the same no matter when one looked at them, it became clear to the old master that Saturn must have some sort of “appendages” sticking out of it.

Many different attempts were made at mapping these out.
Some of them more “ring like” than others.

Until Huygens concluded that as a planet revolves around its own axis, and any satellites (read moons) revolving around them will generally be seen to change place from one observation to another, the only way in which the “appendages” could be visible at every single observation was if they were in fact not appendages, but a ring.
Otherwise, they, or Saturn, or both would have had to “spin” impossibly quickly.

A realisation which he himself says could not have been possible had he not also seen one of Saturn’s moons.
He assures that earlier observers, and thinkers are completely justified in not having realised this.
That is how initially impossible any notion of a ring formation was even to him.

Today of course, we know all the outer planets, from Jupiter and out to have rings.