Tales from Planet Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub

Saturn Rising

Introduction

This story brings back vivid memories of my own very first glimpse of the planet’s rings, while I was evacuated with my other colleagues in His Majesty’s Exchequer and Audit Department to Colwyn Bay, North Wales, during the early months of World War Two.

I had bought an old-fashioned telescope of about two inches’ aperture from a naval cadet at a local training establishment, who presumably was short of money (not that I was particularly affluent on my Civil Service salary of about five pounds a week). The rather battered instrument consisted of one brass tube sliding inside another. I removed the inner tube (containing the erecting lenses and the eye-piece) and replaced it with a single short-focus lens, increasing the magnifying power considerably. It was through this crude device that I first saw Saturn and its rings, and like every observer since Galileo, was entranced by one of the most breath-taking spectacles in the sky. Little did I imagine, when I wrote this story in 1960, that within less than two decades the fantastically successful Voyager Missions to the outer Solar System would reveal that the rings of Saturn were far more complex and beautiful than anyone had ever dreamed.

The story has, of course, been dated by the scientific discoveries of the last three decades—in particular, we now know that Titan does not have a predominantly methane atmosphere, but one which is mostly nitrogen. (And there goes the main thesis of my novel Imperial Earth, which is also set on Titan. Ah, well, you can’t win ’em all: that story now takes place in a slightly parallel Universe; see the note on “The Wall of Darkness.”)

There is another error which I might have corrected at the time. Even if you could observe Saturn from the surface of Titan (which atmospheric haze will probably prevent), you’d never see it “rising.” Almost certainly, Titan, like our own Moon, has had its rotation tidally braked, so that it always keeps the same face turned towards its primary. So Saturn remains fixed in Titan’s sky, just as the Earth does in the Moon’s.

No problem—we’ll build our hotel in orbit, which is a much better idea anway. From Titan the rings will always appear edge-on, so that they’ll merely be a narrow band of light. Only by viewing them from an inclined orbit can their full glory be appreciated.

Moreover, I suspect that conditions on the surface of Titan will make Antarctica look like Hawaii.

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