Why does saturn twinkle

It is possible to capture these effects of atmospheric distortion in an image, by photographing the changing colours of a twinkling star. For more basic stellar astrophotography, read our guide on how to photograph the stars. For most people, the concept of a twinkling star is quite romantic, and conjures up memories of one of the most famous nursery rhymes of all time.

But for astronomers, the effect of twinkling stars can be a nuisance as it can cause the image seen through a telescope to shake and jump around.

For more on this, read our guide to astronomical seeing. For more on this, read our guide on how to find planets in the night sky. He fell in love with the night sky when he caught his first glimpse of Orion, aged Because all the light is coming from a single point, its path is highly susceptible to atmospheric interference i.

The much closer planets appear instead as tiny disks in the sky a distinction more easily discerned with a telescope than with the naked eye. Their apparent sizes are usually larger than the pockets of air that would distort their light, so the diffractions cancel out and the effects of astronomical scintillation are negligible. Star wheels will help you find your way among the twinkling constellations, and you can trace the appearance of the planets along the ecliptic with a Skygazer's Almanac.

I had a random thought, maybe someone out there has a better idea. Another reason stars twinkle might be because of objects traveling in the lights path. With this sort of occurance happening randomly every minute, every second.

We could possibly looking at a very busy space, instead of the predictable space we know now. Log in to Reply. Interesting line of thought. It was proposed that stellar scintillation, could be due to the turbulence in the Oort cloud, the great envelope of debris and pristine stellar mass surrounding the solar system.

This could very conveniently also explain why planets, moon, satellite do not scintillate. Because they are within the Oort cloud! When were these rings formed? Some believe that these are as old as the planet itself, i. Another possibility is that these rings were formed later some millions of years ago. Why do stars twinkle? So, if there was no atmosphere, would there be no twinkling? Right, there would be no twinking in that case.

Saturn has six main rings.