Solar system · Saturn

Where is Saturn right now?

Saturn and its rings, tilted, drawn in Exo-View

Saturn takes 29 and a half years to go round the Sun, so it spends two or three years in each constellation of the zodiac. It is the planet everyone knows by its rings, and Exo-View puts it where it is at this moment, tipped as it is in the sky, with its rings made of thousands of separate particles.

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Orbit: 29.5 years
Distance from the Sun: 9.5 AU on average, about 1.43 billion km
Width: About 116,000 km: nine Earths side by side, without the rings
Density: 0.69 g/cm³: less than water, so it would float in a big enough ocean
Day: A little over 10½ hours
Tilt: 26.7°, so we see its rings from above, then edge-on, then from below over about 15 years
Rings: About 280,000 km across and, for most of that, only about ten metres thick

What the rings are

Saturn's rings are not solid. They are made of countless pieces of mostly water ice, from grains of sand to blocks the size of a house, each in its own orbit round the planet. They are wide enough to hold about twenty Earths side by side, yet thin enough that when we see them edge-on, as we did in 2025, they almost vanish. Because Saturn is tilted, we see them from above, edge-on, then from below over about 15 years.

Where the rings came from is still argued: they may be a moon torn apart, or the remains of a comet, and some measurements suggest they are young, perhaps only a hundred million years old.

Where it is, and seeing it

Earth passes Saturn about every 378 days, an opposition, when it is nearest and brightest. To the naked eye it is a steady, yellowish point about as bright as the brightest stars; a small telescope, from about 30 times magnification, shows the rings, and Galileo, whose first telescope could not separate them, drew them as two ears in 1610.

Titan and the other moons

Saturn has well over a hundred moons. Titan, the largest, is bigger than Mercury and the only moon with a thick atmosphere, and it has rivers and lakes of liquid methane. Exo-View places Titan where it is now. The Cassini spacecraft studied the system from orbit from 2004 to 2017.

In Exo-View

The key below flies to Saturn and its rings. Fly close and the rings turn from a flat disc into a shower of separate particles, and you can stand among them.