I want to talk more about Saturn, my favorite planet besides the one I'm living on. It's a great celestial gem to ponder through any size telescope.

As I told you last week, look for Saturn in our Western Pennsylvania skies just after evening twilight in the southeastern sky about halfway from the horizon to its zenith.

It's just below the triangular hind quarters of the constellation Leo the Lion. What's really great right now is that Saturn will be available in the sky most of the night as it arcs its way toward the western horizon.

By the way, when you're observing Saturn, or any other celestial object through any size telescope, make sure you take nice long, continuous gazes.

Make yourself comfortable with a chair or a stool and keep your eyeball in the eyepiece for at least five minutes at a time.

There are two reasons for this. First, you need to get used to the light levels inside the eyepiece and, secondly, even if you have clear skies, natural turbulence in the air can cause Saturn to be blurred.

You might need to be patient and wait for the air to temporarily settle down for a few seconds so you can get the clearer view of Saturn. It's worth the wait. Now, there are some clear nights when the turbulence never lets up and Saturn remains blurred all night, so if it doesn't clear up after about five or 10 minutes, pack up your scope and try it again on the next clear night.

One more telescoping trick for observing Saturn is to not be discouraged by a high thin cloud cover, because sometimes that will give you your best views.

The thin clouds cut down on some of the natural glare from the planet allowing you a cleaner view.

The cardinal rule for using a telescope under any circumstances is to let it sit outside for a good half-hour before you use it. The lens and/or mirrors need to acclimate to the temperature outside.

As I told you last week, this is kind of a down year for observing Saturn because the rings are nearly on edge from our vantage point on Earth.

This happens every 14 years or so because of the tilt of Saturn's axis with respect to its 29-year orbit around the sun.

Since the ring system is only about 50 feet in thickness, our edgewise view of it this year isn't much of a view at all. In fact, it will get worse this summer when the rings are exactly edgewise. They will just plain disappear.

While rings are only about 50 feet in thickness, the diameter of Saturn's ring system is more than 130,000 miles. The ratio of this ring thickness to the ring system's diameter is similar to an everyday audio CD with normal thickness but a diameter of 18.5 miles!

The rings of Saturn were first observed by the great astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei in 1610. By the way, this year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's birth. When Galileo trained his 20 power telescope on Saturn he wasn't able to resolve the ring system all that well. In fact, to him it looked as if Saturn had ears.

In later years, the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens described the rings as a disk surrounding Saturn. We now know their true nature. They're made up of billions and billions of bits of ice and rock ranging from the size of pebbles to boulders about the size of average houses.

One theory about these chunks of ice and rock is that they are the remains of a weakly structured moon or possibly a comet that got too close to Saturn and was blown to bits by Saturn's strong gravitational tidal forces.

This debris field has spread out into the ring system we now see and which is believed to be maintained by the gravitational shepherding of Saturn's many moons.

Speaking of which, with Saturn's ring system out of the way this year you have really uninhibited views of Saturn's many moons, 52 at last count, but there could be many, many more.

Through a medium size telescope, they look like a swarm of tiny stars around Saturn. One of them, though, is noticeably brighter. That's Titan, which is about one-and-a-half times the size of our own moon and covered by a thick nitrogen atmosphere similar to our own Earth's.

Titan might have lakes of liquid methane. The Cassini spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn for years and the Huygens space probe that was deployed by Cassini and that landed on Titan show much direct and indirect evidence of this.

Even though Titan's atmosphere is similar to Earth and the surface abounds with organic compounds and ice water, the chances of life as we know it existing there are pretty bleak because of surface temperature of minus 290 degrees, which doesn't even consider what the windchill would be!

One of Saturn's other moons that is really fascinating is Enceladus. Unfortunately, it's really tough to see unless you have a larger telescope. It's without a doubt one of the solar system's most active moons. In fact, in the past few years the Cassini spacecraft has discovered water geysers spewing from cracks near Enceladus' south pole.

Many astronomers think there could be a large ocean of liquid water just below the surface. The strong tidal forces of Saturn are believed to warm up the interior of Enceladus just enough to allow for liquid water below the surface.

The planet Saturn: I just love it. There's so much to observe, so much to learn. This column and last week's just scratch the surface of Saturn.

That's a poor choice of words because the planet itself is mainly just a big ball of hydrogen and some helium covered by clouds of ammonia, methane and other trace contaminants.

Just one more fact that I love about Saturn: Its overall density is less than that of water. If you had a big enough bathtub, Saturn would float on the surface of the water, right next to your rubber ducky!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.