Ephemeris: 10/22/2026 – Saturn’s weird moons
This is Ephemeris for Thursday, October 22nd. Today the Sun will be up for 10 hours and 38 minutes, setting at 6:46, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:08. The Moon, half way from first quarter to full, will set at 5:07 tomorrow morning.
Saturn’s got some pretty weird moons. I’ve talked about Enceladus with its water ice geysers, and Titan with its atmosphere. We also have Iapetus, a moon which has two faces. Its leading face, as it orbits Saturn, is dark, almost black. While his trailing face is white like the other moons. It also has a ridge around its equator, that, reminds me of a walnut.. Another strange moon is Hyperion, a moon that looks like a sponge. Its density, though made of ice, is half the density of ice. It even looks like a sponge. Then there’s Phoebe. A dark moon that takes over a year to orbit Saturn, backwards from all the other satellites. It’s probably a captured Kuiper Belt Object, and has a dark surface. And that isn’t all of them.
The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.
Addendum
I didn’t have time in the program, but Phoebe and Iapetus have a connection that explains Iapetus’ dark side.
