ON a memorable evening in the year 1610 Galileo sat in the tower of his observatory in Florence, and gazed through his newly-invented “perspective glass” at Saturn, which was then regarded as ...

Of all the astronomical objects visible in a telescope, none has captured human imagination more than the planet Saturn. Since it is easily visible to the unaided eye, humans have seen it since the ...

Five years after the appearance of the great supernova of 1604, Galileo builds his first telescope. He sees the moons of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, the phases of Venus, and the stars in the Milky Way.

“Saturn is again something which Galileo looked at,” Brian says. “He described it as a planet with ears. Now, obviously he didn't believe they were physical ears. But he couldn't understand ...

Saturn's rings, although enormous, are too faint to see from Earth with the naked eye. The first human to ever observe them was Galileo Galilei in 1610 with his home-made telescope, but the ...