July 2, 2001
On the day you were born, the universe was already ancient beyond measure — and yet, in all those billions of years, it had never once...
The Seasons of Saturn
Birthday · July 2, 2001
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APOD published July 2, 2001. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Soon it will be winter in Saturn's northern hemisphere. Since Saturn is tilted in its orbit around the Sun, it has seasons just like the Earth. When a hemisphere is tilted so that the Sun passes more directly overhead, summer occurs. Half an orbit later -- about 15 (Earth) years for Saturn -- winter occurs. Since the rings of Saturn orbit the equator, they provide a quite graphic seasonal display. The Hubble Space Telescope took the above sequence of images about a year apart, starting on the lower left in 1996. Saturn's rings are less than 50 meters thick and are composed of pebble and boulder sized chunks of dusty water ice.