One of the coolest astronomical events I witnessed growing did not happen as I watched the sky. It occurred watching television. Live imagery being beamed back to Earth from the Voyager I mission. I was young at the time, it was 1980, and a fledgling 24 hour news channel was running live broadcasts from NASA showing the spacecraft's approach to the ringed planet. Images of Saturn's rings appeared line by line across a CRT at Voyager's mission control center. What I witnessed astonished me, as well as many NASA scientists at the time, as raw close up images gradually appeared of Saturn's rings. I recall seeing for the first time, complex structures within Saturn's rings. Such complexity within the rings of Saturn was never dreamed of as only blurry telescopic shots of the ring were all that was available at that time.
Twenty years prior to the visit to Saturn, Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick collaborated on a movie and book project that had a profound impact on how space exploration was depicted in movies. However, there was one notable change made in the movie script that departed from the novel. The book continued the voyage onward to Saturn, while the movie script stopped the voyage at Jupiter.
In a commentary to the 30 year edition to 2001, Arthur C. Clarke makes note of the decision to stop the movie script mission at Jupiter as being a fortuitous decision. The net effect was to make the movie more visually appealling since big discoveries on Saturn were still to be made with the Voyage mission. Sticking to a visit to Jupiter in the film allowed 2001 to stand the test of time. Kubrick and Clarke would have never dreamed of adding such special effects to the rings of Saturn if they were to continue to Saturn within the movie script.
Not only is Saturn's ring system complex and varied. There are an astonishing number of moons orbiting Saturn. There are 62 moons orbiting the ringed planet. And these range in size from just a few kilometers in size, to the second largest moon in the solar system with Titan. Titan is big enough to have its own atmosphere.
More recent observations by the Cassini spacecraft revealed more interesting intricacies within the rings of Saturn. since the first 'moonlet' observations in 2006, hundreds more of these objects have been found within the rings of Saturn.
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