dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (06/01/85)
The moon is near Saturn Saturday night. More on Saturn and the moon -- after this. June 1 Saturn's Day The moon celebrates the day of the week by appearing near the ringed planet Saturn Saturday night. Saturday was named for Saturn -- not the planet but the old Roman god of the harvest. The planet Saturn was also named for this god. So the moon will be near Saturn on Saturn's day -- in other words, on Saturday, nearly all night long. You can easily see the pair. The moon and planet are in the southeast when the sun goes down -- and they make a slow arc across the south as Earth turns throughout the night beneath the sky. Like the other planets visible to the naked eye -- Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury -- Saturn was known to the ancients as a "wanderer." It looks like a star from Earth -- but doesn't stay FIXED with respect to the stars. Everything in our solar system, galaxy and universe continually moves through space. But the stars seen in Earth's sky don't appear to move with respect to each other -- because the distances between stars are so vast. Each night, from starrise to starset, stars wheel across the sky in patterns that don't change. But the wanderers -- or planets -- move apart from the stars. Of the bright planets, Saturn is most distant from the sun. So it moves slowest of the planets visible to the naked eye. No one knows why Saturn was named for the Roman god of the harvest. But its slow motion across the sky probably accounts for an earlier Assyrian name -- Lubadsagush -- meaning oldest of the old sheep. Script by Deborah Byrd. (c) Copyright 1984, 1985 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin