Among the four planets that we commonly see, the easiest, perhaps,
to keep track of is Saturn. Its peculiar aspect is very distinctly
marked. It appears as a large, pale, yellow star shining with a soft,
misty light that sometimes barely escapes being dull. It is always as
bright as a first-magnitude star, but not always as bright as Sirius,
and never as brilliant as Mars, Jupiter, or Venus when they are at
their brightest. The general effect of it is as a large rather than a
brilliant star.
The only time it loses these very marked characteristics is when it
is drawing in toward the sun, and thus nearing conjunction. At such
times we see it each evening lower in the rosy glow of the setting sun,
and more and more obscured and changed in color by the surrounding
atmosphere. Then it sometimes seems as red as Mercury, and sometimes
even twinkles a little in a sort of farewell gaiety as it backs away
from us into the rays of the dazzling sun and finally disappears for
a time from the evening sky. Proximity to the sun and entanglement in
the atmosphere of the horizon has this effect more or less on all the
planets, as we know, but it always seems unexpected in Saturn, because
it is so out of keeping with his ordinarily large, pale, placid face,
which suggests softness and gentleness rather than vivacity.
But there is no mistaking the planet even under this aspect if we but
stop to think where he is. And it is through knowing where he is that
it is so easy to keep track of Saturn. For nearly two years and a half,
on an average, he remains in the same constellation, passing slowly
over about one degree a month, or a little more than twelve degrees in
a year, occupying almost thirty years in making one circuit through the
constellations of the zodiac. One has, therefore, ample time to get
well acquainted with him before he has wandered far from the position
in which one first found him.
For nearly six months each year Saturn shines as an evening star, and,
returning each year as he does with such slight changes of position,
he comes to have something of the stability of a fixed star. Having
seen him one year, we can count on his returning the next only about
thirteen days behind time, and but little farther from his original
position than twice the distance between the pointers in the Big Dipper.
The one degree a month which he travels along the ecliptic is toward
the east, except for a little more than two months before opposition,
and the same length of time afterward, when he has the slight apparent
retrograde motion due to our overtaking and passing him, which has
been explained. With Saturn this motion is so slight--only four
degrees--that it does not put him much out of position, and it is, in
fact, not much noticed except by close observers. He has all the time
been going steadily on toward the east (for the retrograde motion is
only an apparent motion), and the annual change of twelve degrees in
position is always in this direction.
My first acquaintance with Saturn was when he was traveling through
Pisces and Aries, where there are no first-magnitude stars to mark
the path of the wandering bodies in the heavens. It was then that I
was most impressed with the fixity and reliability of his return.
Every autumn then for five years we watched Antares passing toward
the west, followed by the little “milk dipper” in Sagittarius; and
then Fomalhaut, crossing the sky in the same direction, though below
the constellations of the zodiac; and then turned our eyes toward
the east, knowing that the next bright body to come peeping over the
tops of the trees would be Saturn. And when the first frosts began to
strip the leaves from the trees we found the compensation that nature
always gives when she destroys one beauty: we could see earlier in the
evening, through the bare branches, that lovely yellowish disc, with
its suggestion of aloofness and grandeur that is peculiar to it. For
the face of Saturn, while never what we would call cold, has little
in it of that bright, warm, friendly aspect which is at times so
characteristic of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter.