APOD: 2024 December 8 Б Aurora around Saturns North Pole
8.12.2024

Are Saturn's auroras like Earth's? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn's North Pole simultaneously during Cassini's final orbits around the gas giant in September 2017. During this time, Saturn's tilt caused its North Pole to be clearly visible from Earth.

Three Planets from Pic du Midi
2.06.2016

Seen any planets lately? All three planets now shining brightly in the night sky are imaged in these panels, captured last week with the 1 meter telescope at Pic du Midi Observatory in the French Pyrenees.

Retrograde Mars and Saturn
15.09.2016

Wandering Mars and Saturn have spent much of this year remarkably close in planet Earth's night sky. In a sequence of exposures spanning mid-December 2015 through the beginning of this week, this composited...

APOD: 2023 June 18 Б Saturns Northern Hexagon
18.06.2023

Why would clouds form a hexagon on Saturn? Nobody is sure. Originally discovered during the Voyager flybys of Saturn in the 1980s, nobody has ever seen anything like it anywhere else in the Solar System.

Mimas: Small Moon with a Big Crater
25.04.1999

Mimas is one of the smaller moons of Saturn but shows one of the largest impact craters. In fact, if the impact had been much greater, it would have disrupted the entire satellite. The large crater has been named Herschel after the 1789 discoverer of Mimas, Sir William Herschel.

APOD: 2026 May 6 Б The Retrograde Dance of Saturn and Neptune
6.05.2026

What does it mean for Saturn and Neptune to be in retrograde? Featured is a composite of images taken over 34 nights from May 2025 to February 2026 tracing Saturn (brighter, foreground) and Neptune (dimmer, background). Over that time, the two planets exhibited retrograde motion, meaning they appeared to move backward in the sky.

APOD: 2026 May 20 Б The Dark Wolf Nebula
20.05.2026

A dark wolf lies in gum. No, this isnБt a riddle! Today's image features the Dark Wolf Nebula (SandqvistБLindroos 17), a spooky dust cloud embedded within the Gum 55 (RCW 113) Nebula in the Scorpius constellation.

Saturn: 1993 2022
19.08.2022

Saturn is the most distant planet of the Solar System easily visible to the unaided eye. With this extraordinary, long-term astro-imaging project begun in 1993, you can follow the ringed gas giant for one Saturn year as it wanders once around the ecliptic plane, finishing a single orbit around the Sun by 2022.

Saturn and ISS
9.07.2022

Soaring high in skies around planet Earth, bright planet Saturn was a star of June's morning planet parade. But very briefly on June 24 it posed with a bright object in low Earth orbit, the International Space Station.

APOD: 2025 February 23 Б Saturn in Infrared from Cassini
23.02.2025

Saturn looks slightly different in infrared light. Bands of clouds show great structure, including long stretching storms. Also quite striking in infrared is the unusual hexagonal cloud pattern surrounding Saturn's North Pole. Each side of the dark hexagon spans roughly the width of our Earth.