I’ve already completed my bucket list. It had one item on it. I didn’t know that item was on my bucket list until I did it, or even that I had a list. But now I know that I will die having seen the rings of Saturn through a telescope. I would like you to make sure that you, too, die that way. Wait, that sounds ominous.
Let me back up. It was about a decade ago, at some open house event at my neighborhood arts center, and someone had brought a telescope. I don’t think he worked there; I think he just liked bringing his telescope places and letting people look through it. It wasn’t even a particularly large telescope, to my eye: easily portable, set up on a tripod, and with a line of just two or three people waiting to use it. Can I look?, I asked, stupidly. You bet.
What is it pointed at? I asked. Just look.
I looked and saw the planet Saturn, its surface a hazy blend of yellows, browns, and slate grays, hanging like a Christmas tree ornament in the blackness. I saw its rings, looking so solid, and the bands of its rings, and the blank space between them and the planet itself. I saw tiny dots that I was told were moons—that part, I would have to trust. The rest of it required no faith whatsoever. There it was: nothing had ever been more real.
It is hard to describe that realness in words. You know what Saturn looks like. It looks like the photo atop this blog, which was taken through a 14-inch telescope probably not unlike the one I was using. But it is a distant planet. In my mental taxonomy of things I might someday encounter in my field of vision, Saturn is not one of them, while pictures of Saturn are.
I have long been obsessed with that delta between the thing and the image. Therein lies wonder. I am told by my parents, though I do not remember, that when they took me to my first baseball game after having only seen it on television, and we emerged from the concourse into the upper deck and gazed out on the impossible greenness of the field, I said, with awe in my voice, “It’s real.” Seeing Saturn was something like that. It’s the difference between seeing a whale and knowing they exist. It’s the difference between having sex and watching pornography. (For the record, I would also recommend to readers of this blog that they have sex before they die. However, if I were given the choice between the two right this moment, I’d pick Saturn.)
So much of science can feel rooted in the intangible, astronomy, even the non-theoretical parts, is a good example. There is a necessary separation between you and the thing. So many of the images we fawn over require a trillion-dollar space telescope viewing nonhuman electromagnetic wavelengths, and a large team of people to make it happen. Sure, the Deep Field is cool, but it requires me to take someone else’s word for something. I can’t go look at the actual thing. Saturn through a telescope discards the gatekeeping. There is you, and a lens, and a solid and substantial planet a billion miles away. There is nothing else worth seeing or knowing in the universe, at that moment.
The span of the human lineage doesn’t seem so long, then. You may feel a kinship with our earliest ancestors on the savannah, seeking patterns in the lights in the sky, wondering why a select few move night after night. Or with Galileo, trying to make sense of the “triple nature,” as he called it, of the recently discovered planet and what he didn’t and couldn’t know were its rings. His sketches:
I know, again on that theoretical level, that Saturn’s ring system is an incredible piece of cosmic architecture. Particles of mostly ice and a little bit of rock, tiny to the point of individual insignificance—most smaller than a grain of sand. The rings are never wider than a single kilometer at any point. All told, they are “about half the mass of the entire Antarctic ice shelf, spread across a surface area 80 times that of Earth,” Marina Koren writes. How could something so gossamer appear so robust? And yet, there it was, through the telescope: the rings casting a slim but discernible shadow on the planet itself, giving the interplanetary tableau depth, and weight. No two-dimensional image this. This is real.
Me trying to describe all this to you is like—well, it’s like someone explaining sex. Sure, it might whet your appetite for the real thing, but it’s a piss-poor substitute. So how does one see Saturn? Tons of universities and science museums host regular astronomy open houses, where the public is invited to come peer through their telescopes, and they have experts on hand to explain what it is you’re seeing. If it is visible at that time of the month and year, Saturn is always, always the first celestial body they’ll show you. This is because they know what I know, and what that random guy in Brooklyn who sets up his telescope in the middle of the street for passersby knows, and that is that Saturn is the most beautiful thing in the sky, and after you have seen it, your life will be different—now you will be the person who bothers all your friends by constantly telling them they need to see Saturn through a telescope.
Annoyingly, you might want to wait a few months to go looking, because Saturn is undergoing one of its periodic ring plane crossings, in which its tilt means the rings are edge-on and nearly invisible from Earth. The good news is that Saturn is not going anywhere. It will be waiting for you when you’d like to see it for yourself.