Say you’re cruising along on your handy dandy little space scooter, what would you see as you approached the ringed planets?
What do the rings actually look like to the naked eye, in particular as you get closer?
I know that the pics shown online tend to be touched up.
Is there any terrestrial example to what they would look like?
I seem to recall a few months ago, reading about and seeing pictures from the probe we sent to Saturn, and it turns out they look pretty much exactly like the pictures we see from telescopes. Let me go see if I can come back with a link.
Here we go:
According to this site, the images captured by Cassini seen here are true color, so that’s pretty much exactly what they look like.
If it’s true color, does that mean the brightness is the same as well? I’m not sure if “brightness” is the correct term - but, given Saturn’s distance from the sun, would the rings look that bright with the naked eye? I’d imagine that if they have a lot of water ice in their composition, they might be more reflective.
Thread necromancy: Klaatu Barada Nicktu.
Anyways, I have a question about this. Looking at Cassini video, I can see that the rings can be seen to orbit Saturn at a pretty good speed. Question is, how fast do they go? Do they do a quarter orbit in a single day? Do the ice particles in the A ring take a week to go around, while the E ring zings around several times per day? Does each track go at its own speed like in Frogger?
Well, since the zombie is up and walking around…
It doesn’t take a very high-powered (by modern standards) telescope to actually be able to see Saturn and its rings from your backyard. So to speak. If you can locate a nearby astronomy club in your area someone will probably be willing to show you Saturn with a telescope that will allow you to see it with your own two (slightly aided) eyes.
Yes, you can see the rings. I thought the planet and ring system looked mostly a pale yellow-gold color. The rings were distinctly ring-like, though without the visible complexity shown in the probes that actually orbited Saturn.
Uranus… I got nuthin’ from experience there.
Long’s we’re zombified… What do the rings of Saturn look like up close? I’ve seen lots of art, but how accurate is it? What do we know for sure?
Is it like Han Solo and the asteroid field, boulders the size of houses? Or is it like a sandstorm in the desert, with lots of little bitty particles? How far apart are they on the average? In a good sandstorm, there might be dozens or hundreds of grains per square inch; how about in the heart of the densest rings?
I know, in the distant past, they could only make estimates based on the diminution of light as distant stars were eclipsed by the rings. Good statistical work gave a range of possible sizes of the “ring rubble,” and distances between them. What do we know today?
You can get a first-order estimate from the fact that the surface orbital period around a spherical object depends only on the parent object’s density. So if we approximate Saturn as having the same density as Earth, we would have the innermost ring particles (which are close to the planet’s surface) making one orbit every hour and a half or so, same as a satellite in low-Earth orbit.
Of course, Saturn’s density is not the same as the Earth’s. In fact, it’s only about an eighth as dense. So now we also need to know how the period depends on density. As it happens, surface orbital period is proportional to one over the square root of the density. So this would mean that the period of a ring particle would be a little less than three times the period of an Earth satellite, or about four hours.
And the period also depends on distance. Kepler’s Third Law tells us that P^2 is proportional to a^3, where P is the period and a is the average orbital distance (technically, the semimajor axis). So a ring particle that’s four times further out would have a period that’s eight times as long.
