The System of Saturn

THE SYSTEM OF SATURN.

...seen) Completing the sentence from the previous page: "...at the same time we have seen." I released the observation, and together with it a hypothesis that would contain the cause of the remaining phenomena of Saturn; however, I wrote this with the order of the letters scrambled original: "elementorum," here referring to the letters of his famous 1656 anagram: "aaaaaaa ccccc d eeeee g h iiiiiii llll mm nnnnnnnnn oooo pp q rr s ttttt uuuuu," which rearranged meant "It is surrounded by a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic.", so that it might merely testify that I was not ignorant of the cause at that time, and so that others might also be invited in this way to publish what they had devised, and not complain that the glory of the discovery had been snatched from them. Afterwards, however, at the request of that same distinguished man, I also solved this literary riddle original: "gryphum," a word for a sphinx-like enigma or "griffin" of a puzzle and briefly explained the entire hypothesis to him; from which our opinion regarding the phases of Saturn has perhaps already reached many. But the wondrous and unusual construction of nature regarding this planet certainly demands a more full treatment; nor should we expect everyone to have faith in what we report or assume to explain the phenomena, unless they see these things supported by both the weight of reasons and the testimony of observations. Therefore, we intend to provide both of these now. And first, we will define as accurately as possible from our observations those things pertaining to the motion and period of the companion planet Saturn's largest moon, Titan, which Huygens discovered in 1655, and we will establish tables of its motion. Then we shall assign each of the phases of Saturn itself to their causes, so that it will be easy to predict future phases from them.

A description of our telescopes.

But before we present the observations, it will be useful to report a few things about our telescopes with which we drew them from the sky, so that those who desire to gaze upon the companion of Saturn and the wonderful shapes of the planet itself may know what kind of tubes and lenses they need for this; and so that they may compare their own, if they have any, with ours. The first one we employed did not exceed twelve feet in length, equipped with two convex lenses, of which the one closest to the eye gathered parallel rays at a distance of a little less than three inches, or unciae of the Rhenish foot Rhenish foot: A common contemporary measurement unit (pes Rhenolandicus) used in the Low Countries, roughly equivalent to 31.4 centimeters.. With it, we first discovered the new planet and observed it for several months, as well as that form of Sa-