Welcome to our Solar / Planetary Walk which has been established in memorial to Alfred Piff, a longtime member of MBG and supporter of education for all. As you travel along the walk, you will experience the scale model of our solar neighborhood. Our walk is approximately .79 miles, and each planet is marked by Planetary Art Posts created by Nancy Thomas. Scanning the QR at each post will give access to information about each planet. Enjoy your walk!
Planet SATURN
Planet Saturn is sponsored by The Shirk Family Fund.
A pale yellow planet with awesome rings, made of ice-covered dust and rocks controlled by Saturn’s gravity and many shepherding moons. The system is tilted slightly to our line of sight. It is the prettiest planet after the Earth, and is easy to see with the naked eye. A small telescope reveals the ring system. It is the second-largest planet and has many moons, including large Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere. Titan also has orange clouds and methane rain. Saturn’s cloudtop gravity is 1.07 g’s.
DIAMETER: 74,900 miles
DISTANCE FROM SUN: 9.54 AU = 887 million miles = 80 light minutes
ROTATION: 10.2 hours
REVOLUTION AROUND ORBIT: 29.5 years
MOONS: Titan, plus many others – and a fabulous ring system
NAMED FOR: Saturn, the Roman god of the harvest and Jupiter’s father
Some Fun Facts - Did you know?
Saturn’s atmosphere shines in this false-color image taken with Hubble’s infrared camera. The blue colors indicate a clear atmosphere down to a main cloud layer, green and yellow colors indicate a haze above the main cloud layer, and the red and orange colors indicate clouds reaching up high into the atmosphere. NASA/Hubble
Saturn’s rings are about 100,000 km wide, but only about 100 feet thick in some spots.
When Voyager 1 passed Saturn in 1980 on its way out of the solar system, it took a snapshot of some of Saturn’s larger moons. Saturn’s largest moon is Titan NASA/Hubble
