For thousands of years people have looked up at night into the void of outer space and gazed at the stars and planets.

In Northern New Jersey there are quite a few of these people as evidenced by the number of amateur astronomy clubs. With a current star chart and a good cloudless night, anyone can begin learning about the universe we live in. A star chart for your area can be found on the Internet or in your local paper. The New York Times publishes a star chart weekly in the Sunday edition that is good for the following week. Binoculars are an excellent next step for beginners who then may move on to a telescope.

In 2002 and 2003, a good subject for observation is Saturn. New Jersey and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward Saturn where it is high above the horizon, buildings and trees. Saturn's light is passing though the least amount of atmosphere creating the perfect conditions for viewing. Last year, Mars, named for the Roman god of war, was prominent in the sky. Now Saturn, the bringer of wisdom, rules the night sky. Saturn has the most moons of any planet with more than twenty and was one of the first objects observed by Galileo through the newly invented telescope in 1610.

To Galileo, Saturn's unusual shape presented a mystery until another astronomer, Christiaan Huygens, correctly identified Saturn as a sphere with disc-like rings around it. The space between the outermost and the inner ring is called the Cassini Division which was discovered in 1676. The spacecraft Pioneer 11 and Voyager 2 visited Saturn between 1979 and 1981. The Cassini-Huygens Satellite is on it's way to Saturn and it's moon Titan to begin orbiting Saturn on July 1, 2004.

The time Saturn takes to go once around the sun, a Saturn year, is a little more than 29 Earth years. The last time Saturn and it's rings were in the same position was 1972. During the mid to late 1980's, Saturn was very low in the sky and viewing was diminished by the haze of the Earth's atmosphere.

This year, the Earth will be the closest to Saturn since 1975. The rings change their tilt because Saturn's axis, like Earth, is tilted at an angle to the sun. The rings in the current position clearly display the Cassini Division. As Saturn orbits the sun, the tilt causes it to have different seasons similar to what happens one Earth. This change is evidenced by the position of the rings. In the time lapse images above, the Hubble Space Telescope recorded this change over a five year period beginning in 1996 and continuing to the year 2000.

False color image of Saturn using the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), April 23, 1998.

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Astronomy - Star Gazing in Northern New Jersey