Saturn, the planet of 'Aquarius and Capricorn
Saturn is the most distant planet known to the ancients, is the second largest in the solar system and the most easily recognizable to the telescope to the extensive system of bright rings around him.
As Jupiter has an atmosphere made up of clouds that surrounds an internal structure of liquid hydrogen and helium, and its family of satellites is the most numerous, fewer than 18 moons.
To the naked eye, Saturn appears as a bright yellow star, already the binoculars revealed a small disc slightly elliptical because of the rings, with a small telescope, but are easy to find the rings, loose twice the planet.
Among the five planets visible to the naked eye, Saturn has the lowest angular displacement in the sky, so that his opposition occurs every year and two weeks when in this formation observed with a hundred magnifications, the size of the moon.
Its disk is surrounded by much less conspicuous cloud belts of the other giant of the solar system, and is also devoid of structures similar to the great Red Spot, in the equatorial zone of the planet about every thirty years during the summer in the northern hemisphere, large white spots appear.
Depending on the position along the orbit of Saturn solar rings are shown in different angles to the combination of the tilt of the planet and its orbit than ours.
At full tilt the rings occur at an angle of 27 °, twice during the rotation of Saturn around the Sun, the rings are cut and because they are really thin, disappear from view, this phenomenon also occurred in 2009.
The atmosphere of Saturn's cloud is similar to that of Jupiter except that it is colder near the equator the wind speed reaches 1800 km per hour, maximum demand for a planet: below the clouds are a layer of hydrogen and liquid helium, and innermost, a rocky core.
The average density of the planet is about 70% of that of water, the lowest found between all the planets.
The low density combined with the rapid rotation gives Saturn a highly elliptical shape: it has an equatorial diameter of approximately 12000 km greater than that polar.
The rings of Saturn consist of ice particles with diameters greater than ever few meters, the orbits of the satellites closer to the planet lie within the plane of the rings.
Pan orbit in a region of low density known as Division of Encke, in the outer zone of the ring A, the next satellite Atlas, orbit on the border of the ring A, while Prometheus and Pandora orbit on opposite edges of the ring F: certain satellites through the same orbit.
Other satellites of Saturn are: Janus, Epimetheus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Calypso, Telesto, Dione, Helene, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, starting from the outside of the ring A to the more distant, whose most extensive of which is Titan with a diameter of 5150 Km
Saturn has always been linked to death and the passage of time so much so that was depicted as an old man tearing his strings, a clear allusion to the fact that everything that arises is devoured by the passage of time: in this capacity he became the ruler zodiacal signs of Aquarius and Capricorn.