View from saturn

[hirumaui]

Does anyone here have links to what it would look like be standing on Saturn at midnight looking up? Would the glow from the rings make stars, planets invisible to the naked eye? After seeing the beautiful image of the night side of Saturn ( Cassini 2006), I would love to see a scientifically accurate image which has been created to illustrate this.

[Chris Peterson]

Does anyone here have links to what it would look like be standing on Saturn at midnight looking up? Would the glow from the rings make stars, planets invisible to the naked eye? After seeing the beautiful image of the night side of Saturn ( Cassini 2006), I would love to see a scientifically accurate image which has been created to illustrate this.

Saturn is a gas giant, so you'd need to define carefully what it means to be standing "on" it. If you were below the cloud tops, you'd not see any stars at all, regardless of the ring glow. If you were above the clouds, there is no scattering atmosphere, so you should see the stars just fine as long as you block your direct view of the rings... very much the way that the stars are visible from the day lit Moon if you block scattered light from the surface.

[neufer]

Does anyone here have links to what it would look like be standing on Saturn at midnight looking up? Would the glow from the rings make stars, planets invisible to the naked eye? After seeing the beautiful image of the night side of Saturn ( Cassini 2006), I would love to see a scientifically accurate image which has been created to illustrate this.

Saturn is a gas giant, so you'd need to define carefully what it means to be standing "on" it. If you were below the cloud tops, you'd not see any stars at all, regardless of the ring glow.

If you were above the clouds, there is no scattering atmosphere, so you should see the stars just fine as long as you block your direct view of the rings... very much the way that the stars are visible from the day lit Moon if you block scattered light from the surface.

Compared to our own Moon Saturn's rings would:

• 1) cover a much wider swath of the sky
  2) be much closer (a maximum of ~100,000 km away vs. 350,000 km for the moon)
  3) have a much higher albedo (than the moon's 0.136).

At an average distance of ~50,000 km Saturn's rings would be 24,000 times closer than the rings are to the earth making them ~22 magnitudes [= 5*log₁₀(24,000)] brighter than these rings appear from earth. It would be like having hundreds of full moons in the sky. You would need very large panels to block both the direct view of the rings and their reflected glow off the surface of Saturn.

[Chris Peterson]

At an average distance of ~50,000 km Saturn's rings would be 24,000 times closer than the rings are to the earth making them ~22 magnitudes [= 5*log₁₀(24,000)] brighter than these rings appear from earth. It would be like having hundreds of full moons in the sky. You would need very large panels to block both the direct view of the rings and their reflected glow off the surface of Saturn.

Not at all. If you were "laying" on your back, the glow off of Saturn would not affect your vision. To block the rings, you'd need do nothing more than hold your arm (or arms) up in the right position. Sure, the stars would be invisible where they were actually blocked by the rings (and by your arms). But the rest would show up just fine.

It would also matter where you were. If you were right on the equator, the rings would hardly have an effect at all on the view of the sky. Likewise if you were at one of the poles.

[neufer]

How about "laying" on your back &wearing horse-blinders:

• one side to block the eastern sunlit rings and
  the other side to block the western sunlit rings.

At an average distance of ~50,000 km Saturn's rings would be 24,000 times closer than the rings are to the earth making them ~22 magnitudes [= 5*log₁₀(24,000)] brighter than these rings appear from earth. It would be like having hundreds of full moons in the sky. You would need very large panels to block both the direct view of the rings and their reflected glow off the surface of Saturn.

Not at all. If you were "laying" on your back, the glow off of Saturn would not affect your vision. To block the rings, you'd need do nothing more than hold your arm (or arms) up in the right position. Sure, the stars would be invisible where they were actually blocked by the rings (and by your arms). But the rest would show up just fine.

[neufer]

[img3="Spacecraft have yet to witness this scene predicted by Lucien Rudaux
(From "Sur Les Autres Mondes", Lucien Rudaux, Larousse, 1937).
Saturn's ring in the midnight sky, close to the summer solstice,
viewed from a location at high latitude."]http://www.ludekpesek.ch/cramer/fig-1.jpg[/img3]

[hirumaui]

Thank you Chris and Nuefer for your considered and knowledgeable replies. It would be a sight to see, and and you sank into the methane mix the stars would vanish and the sky would glow until you got too deep for the light to penetrate. I live in Hawai'i and love our dark skies. Mahalo and Aloha, -hirumaui

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[Beyond]

The view of the *Venus* type object wasn't too bad either