Saturn is the second largest object in the sun's family. It would take 95 Earths to equal the mass of this great planet, and you could stash more than 750 Earths inside it! Saturn is unquestionably the most spectacular planet for amateur astronomers. The reason, of course, is Saturn's truly awesome system of rings.

Galileo saw them as early as the year 1610. Two years later he thought they had disappeared, only to have them show up again by 1616, when he first sketched them. Galileo, however, believed he was seeing three objects.

It wasn't until 1659 that astronomer Christian Huygens discerned their true nature.

No one yet knows how these rings formed. We may be seeing the remains of a moon that got smashed and scattered, or a collection of debris equal to the mass of a moon that never did form due to Saturn's vast tidal gravity.

There are three major sets of rings: the bright A and B rings and the fainter C ring. Each is less than one kilometer (half a mile) thick, but tens of thousands of kilometers wide. The bits that make them up range from fine grained powder up to pieces the size of a house. A few tiny moons can be found among the rings, "shepherding" the ring material. The Voyager spacecraft showed that each of these three rings is actually composed of hundreds of tiny ringlets. Voyager also revealed the presence of several fainter outer rings.