Title: Saturn
Author: WordPress.org
Published: 5. 7. 2021
Last modified: 27. 5. 2022

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Son of Uranus and Vesta, Saturn was the God of Time and Fate. He is generally represented
as an aged man bearing a scythe. His mythological character is only the expression
of his celestial aspect, as we have seen for the brilliant Jupiter, for the pale
Venus, the ruddy Mars, and the agile Mercury. The revolution of Saturn is the slowest
of any among the planets known to the ancients. It takes almost thirty years for
its accomplishment, and at that distance the Saturnian world, though it still shines
with the brilliancy of a star of the first magnitude, exhibits to our eyes a pale
and leaden hue. Here is, indeed, the god of Time, with slow and almost funereal 
gait.

Poor Saturn won no favor with the poets and astrologers. He bore the horrid reputation
of being the inexhaustible source of misfortune and evil fates,—whereof he is wholly
innocent, troubling himself not at all with our world nor its inhabitants.

This world travels in the vastness of the Heavens at a distance of 1,421 million
kilometers (881,000,000 miles) from the Sun. Hence it is ten times farther from 
the orb of day than the Earth, though still illuminated and governed by the Sun-
God. Its gigantic orbit is ten times larger than our own.

Its revolution round the Sun is accomplished in 10,759 days, i.e., 29 years, 167
days, and as this strange planet rotates upon itself with great rapidity in 10 hours,
15 minutes, its year comprises no less than 25,217 days. What a calendar! The Saturnians
must needs have a prodigious memory not to get hopelessly involved in this interminable
number of days. A curious world, where each year stands for almost thirty of our
own, and where the day is more than half as short again as ours. But we shall presently
find other and more extraordinary differences on this planet.

In the first place it is nearly nine and a half times larger than our world. It 
is a globe, not spherical, but spheroidal, and the flattening of its poles, which
is one-tenth, exceeds that of all the other planets, even Jupiter. It follows that
its equatorial diameter is 112,500 kilometers (69,750 miles), while its polar diameter
measures only 110,000 kilometers (68,200 miles).

In volume, Saturn is 719 times larger than the Earth, but its density is only 128⁄1,000
of our own; i.e., the materials of which it is composed are much less heavy, so 
that it weighs only 92 times more than our Earth. Its surface is 85 times vaster
than that of the Earth, no insignificant proportion.