The Moons of Saturn
Titan
5,150 km across · orbits in 16 days — bigger than the planet Mercury, the only moon with a thick atmosphere, and the easiest of Saturn’s moons to spot in a small scope.
Rhea
1,527 km across · orbits in 4.5 days — Saturn’s second-largest moon, an icy, heavily cratered world.
Iapetus
1,469 km across · orbits in 79 days — famously two-toned, one hemisphere bright as snow and the other dark as coal.
Enceladus
504 km across · orbits in 1.4 days — a brilliant white iceball that jets plumes of water from a hidden ocean through cracks at its south pole.
Saturn has 140-plus confirmed moons, but Titan is the one to hunt for — a steady point of light that swings from one side of the planet to the other over about eight days. On a good night a 6-inch scope will also pick up Rhea, Tethys, Dione and Iapetus.
The Planet Itself
Disc rotation
10h 33m
One Saturn day
Diameter
116,460 km
9 Earths across
Ring span
282,000 km
Yet only ~10 m thick
Saturn’s rings are the showpiece of the whole sky — countless particles of water ice, from dust grains to house-sized boulders, spread across a span wider than the Earth-Moon distance yet only tens of metres thick. The dark Cassini Division splitting them shows in a 4-inch scope. The rings tilt over Saturn’s 29-year orbit; after the 2025 edge-on crossing they are opening wider each year through 2032, making this a superb stretch for viewing them.