OVERVIEW
] PLANETSaturn is a . It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 9.53668 . It has a mass of 0.30 and a mean radius of 0.81 · 58 232 . It has been known since antiquity.
The ringed planet, wrapped in billions of orbiting ice fragments no thicker overall than a city is tall. It is also less dense than water.
- WHAT IT IS
- Gas giant
- HOW FAR
- 9.537
- HOW BIG
- 0.81 · 58 232
- ONE ORBIT TAKES
- 29.5
Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.
Its mean radius: half the width across.
One trip round the Sun.
THE MODEL
] WITH ITS RINGSCALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · CATALOGUED RADIUS · DENSITY 0.687 G/CM³ FROM MASS AND RADIUS · GEOMETRIC ALBEDO 0.470 · GAS GIANT · RADIUS 58 200 KM · LIT FROM WHERE THE SUN IS · TURNING ABOUT ITS OWN POLE · SURFACE FROM A GLOBAL MAP · LONGITUDES NOT REGISTERED · RINGS C, B, CASSINI DIVISION, A, F
Drawn from the catalogued radius and from the same properties the picture at the top of this page uses, at the distance a flight to it would stop. Its 5 rings are geometry rather than a texture — each band's edges and its optical depth are catalogued, and how opaque it looks is worked out from the angle the ray crosses it at, which is why they thicken towards edge-on. The outermost reaches 2.4 times the body's own radius. The colour across them is the only part that is not: that comes from a measured radial cut, which is why the inner ring is grey where the middle one is the colour of dirty ice. The surface is a global map rather than a pattern — a mosaic of real images, wrapped on by latitude and longitude. It is saturated in colour and with the gaps in its coverage filled by its publisher, whose radial cut through the rings supplies their colour too. Where it sits round the axis claims nothing: what a map of a fluid envelope shows is weather, and the clouds in this one have moved since it was taken. The maps come from Solar System Scope, under CC BY 4.0. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, at their real positions and drawn from where the camera actually is — so the constellations are wrong, and that is the point. This is the sky from there, not the sky from here.
IMAGES
] 4 FRAMES- NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI / color composite by Gordan Ugarkovic
Public domain - NASA
Public domain - NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Public domain - NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Public domain
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Saturn for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
Say where you are, and this line says when Saturn is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEBright enough to pick out with your eyes alone, and from a lit street as well as a dark one. Today it is 18.9″ across. It stops being a point of light at about 3×, and at 48× it is a clear disc with an edge you can see.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- 18.9
- SHOWS A DISC FROM
- 3×
- AS WIDE AS THE MOON LOOKS AT
- 99×
- RINGS ACROSS
- 45.5
- MAGNITUDE TODAY
- 0.29 · within reach
The rings reach 45.5″ from edge to edge, tilted 8.3° out of edge-on this year against a possible 27. What decides whether there is anything there to look at is the material rather than the reach: the densest band, B, is 4.13″ wide on the sky — set that against the above — and its of 1.5 stops 78% of the light passing through it.
Its largest moons swing out to 1.0′ for Dione, 1.4′ for Rhea, 3.3′ for Titan and 9.6′ for Iapetus, at their widest. Every one of them gets further out than this equipment separates. How bright they are is another question, and one the catalogue does not answer: it publishes no magnitude for any moon.
Computed for 2026-09-11 from the centre of the Earth, and from the mean radius the catalogue holds. A distance changes daily, so this width is a fact about that date and not about the body.
CATALOG DATA
] 13 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Mean temperature
- −140
- Rotation period
- 10.66
HOW BRIGHT IT IS
What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.
- Geometric albedo
- 0.47
- Bond albedo
- 0.342
WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES
Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.
- North pole (RA)
- 40.589
- North pole (Dec)
- 83.537
THE ORBIT
The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.
- Orbital period
- 29.46
- Eccentricity
- Inclination
- 2.49
- Longitude of ascending node
- 113.66
- Longitude of perihelion
- 92.6
- Mean longitude
- 49.95
- Element epoch
- 2451545.0000
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 1 DESIGNATIONS- Common name Saturn
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. Saturn [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/saturn
@misc{spacecatalog_saturn,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Saturn}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/saturn},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from SpaceCatalog curated data.}
}The values above were taken from SpaceCatalog curated data — CC-BY-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.
RECENT ACTIVITY
] 3 ITEMS- Hubble: Decagon Around Saturn's South Pole2026-09-08 · NASA APOD · IMAGE
- APOD: 2026 September 8 – Hubble: Decagon Around Saturn’s South Pole2026-09-08 · NASA · MISSION UPDATE
- APOD: 2026 September 8 – Hubble: Decagon Around Saturn’s South Pole2026-09-08 · NASA · RELEASE
NASA APOD · NASA · UPDATED DAILY