Don’t miss Saturn at its biggest and brightest this week.
Saturn is in opposition this weekend, which means that it’s on the opposite side of our planet from the Sun. When this happens, the Sun acts like a cosmic spotlight, lighting Saturn up brighter than usual — just in time for the ringed planet’s closest approach to Earth this year. Here’s how to catch Saturn in the spotlight:
How to See Saturn’s Rings This Week
Saturn will rise in the eastern sky just after sunset for the next few nights. The planet will be visible all night as it traces a path across the sky and sets shortly before sunrise, but the best view will happen after the Moon sets around midnight (which is also when Saturn is at its highest in the sky).
The distant gas giant should be fairly easy to spot, since it will be brighter than the nearby stars, but if you want to be sure of what you’re seeing, use a stargazing app like Stellarium to help you find Saturn and other points of interest, like Mercury. With the unaided eye, Saturn will look like a very bright star, but with a high-end set of binoculars or a telescope, the rings will stand out, bright and clear.
Technically, Saturn will be directly opposite the Sun at 12:27 AM local time on the night of September 7 to September 8. But the ringed planet will be in the spotlight from about September 5 through September 9.
Why is Saturn so Bright This Week?
Shortly after midnight on the night of September 7 to September 8, Earth will be directly in between Saturn and the Sun. While Saturn is high in the sky just after midnight in the U.S., the Sun will be high overhead just before noon on the other side of the world.
The result is like a full Moon, except with a giant gas planet: Sunlight will shine directly onto Saturn, so the entire half of the planet that’s facing Earth will be lit up. From our point of view, the planet’s shadow is hidden behind its gassy bulk, instead of falling on the rings or part of the planet’s surface. Meanwhile, all the weirdly-shaped bits of ice and rock that make up Saturn’s famous rings will be catching sunlight and reflecting it like a disco ball, making the rings shine even brighter than the planet itself. This dazzling effect is how astronomer Hugo von Seeliger figured out, back in the mid-1800s, that Saturn’s rings are made of millions of fragments of rock and ice, instead of being solid, smooth disks.
