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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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,\u2014whereof he is wholly innocent, troubling himself not at all with our world nor its inhabitants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In volume, Saturn is 719 times larger than the Earth, but its density is only 128\u20441,000 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5911429,"featured_media":2036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[22],"class_list":["post-2067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-space","tag-planet"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/s.w.org\/patterns\/files\/2021\/07\/image-from-rawpixel-id-283668-jpeg-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5911429"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2067"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2068,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2067\/revisions\/2068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/patterns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}