The Astronomer’s Art: Camille Flammarion’s article in 1878 carried this carefully delineated view of Saturn as seen through a telescope. Image: Scientific American Supplement, December 21, 1878
A Buoyant Saturn: By a century ago it was well understood that Saturn was the least dense planet in the solar system—in fact less dense than water. Our imaginative artist shows the planet bobbing in an ocean like a cork... Image: Scientific American, March 20, 1915
Rings of Saturn: What would the rings look like from the planet surface? Here’s one conceptual view from 1915. Image: Scientific American, March 20, 1915
Saturn, from Titan: An artist’s conception from a century ago. Image: Scientific American, March 20. 1915
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Rings of Saturn: An image from the spacecraft Voyager 2. The rings are displayed in false color. Image: Scientific American, November, 1981
Enceladus: One of the moons of Saturn as pictured by Voyager 2. Some parts of the moon are covered by craters, some areas seem quite smooth and may have been volcanilly active recently. Image: Scientific American, January 1982
A Scene from Titan: By 2004 the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft had arrived in Saturn’s gravitational field. Don Dixon used everything that was known about Titan and its atmosphere to create this scene for Scientific American... Image: Don Dixon, Scientific American, June 2004
Postcard from Titan: The Huygens lander lasted about 90 minutes on the ground of an alien world. This image is from the landing site on the surface of Titan. Image: Scientific American, March 2010
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Lakes on Titan: This moon’s surface is cold enough and has sufficient gravity to have lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. The artist’s creation by Ron Miller for Scientific American shows a scene from the surface... Image: Ron Miller, Scientific American, March 2010
The Rings of Saturn: The incomparable Ron Miller created this image of what the planet’s rings might look like, as seen from the planet surface. (Compare this 2010 image with the one from 1915.) Image: Ron Miller, Scientific American, April 2010