Saturn
What is Saturn?
Planets· Diameter 116,460 km. The ringed giant — billions of ice shards in orbit. Less dense than water, and home to Titan and Enceladus, two prime targets in the search for life.
📍 Visible from where you are right now — computed in your browser
bearing · altitude · rise time · best time tonight
Where Saturn is in your sky right now: https://nowsky.org/solar/sky?sel=saturn — location and time set automatically, no login.
Orbit and size
| Diameter | 116,460 km |
|---|---|
| Distance | 9.5 AU |
| Year | 29.5 yr |
| Rings | ~280,000 km |
Figures are representative approximations. Source: compiled from NASA and IAU public data.
Moons of Saturn
Related events
Frequently asked
- How big is Saturn?
- 116,460 km.
- How far is Saturn from Earth?
- 9.5 AU.
- What are the main moons of Saturn?
- Titan, Enceladus, Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethys, Mimas.
- Where is Saturn in the sky right now?
- Open the sky view for your location and time and it shows the position in the sky right now.
The hexagon at the north pole
At Saturn's north pole sits a hexagonal cloud pattern whose sides are longer than Earth is wide. Voyager first photographed it in 1981, and when Cassini arrived in 2004 it was still turning in the same place with the same shape. A jet stream of 320 km/h flows along the six sides, and a vortex 2,000 km across sits at the centre. The south pole has nothing like it.
Why a hexagon has been reproduced in the laboratory: in a rotating fluid, when the speed difference between inner and outer flow takes a particular value, the flow settles into a polygon. Saturn's year is 29.5 Earth years, so Cassini watched the hexagon change from blue to gold as the pole passed from winter darkness into summer sunlight. From Earth the pattern is visible only when Saturn tilts its north pole toward us.
The planet in depth
Saturn's rings span 280,000 km yet are only 10 m to 1 km thick — proportionally thinner than a sheet of paper. They are nearly pure water-ice fragments, pebbles to house-sized blocks, each on its own orbit. Their origin is still argued (a shattered moon? leftover construction material?), and Cassini's data hints they may be surprisingly young — perhaps only ~100 million years.
The planet itself would float (density 0.69) and marshals 270-plus moons (as of 2025). Titan is the only moon with a thick atmosphere and methane lakes; Enceladus vents its buried ocean to space through south-polar fractures — both top-tier targets in the search for life.
Every ~15 years the rings turn edge-on to Earth and vanish. Scrub time in the orbit view and watch their tilt evolve.
The rings may be a limited engagement: Cassini measured 'ring rain' draining material into the planet fast enough to erase them within a few hundred million years, and analyses favor an age of only ~100 million years — the rings may be younger than the dinosaurs. Seeing Saturn ringed is, cosmically speaking, lucky timing.
Related
Figures are representative approximations. Simulated positions use J2000 mean elements.