Saturn is at its closest point to the Earth for 2006 and now's the time to give your telescope the acid test.

Maybe you're not sure how good that telescope you got for Christmas is. Give it the Saturn test. This is the week to do it, because Saturn is only 755 million miles away.

Chances are, though, that with patience you'll like what you see. You don't need a monster scope to enjoy Saturn. Look early in the evening in the low eastern Butler skies. Saturn will look like a really bright star, located a little below the bright stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini the Twins.

Saturn is my favorite target through my telescopes. It's so beautiful. I know that I've won over many people at my stargazing classes and parties after they've seen Saturn through my telescope.

It's a 75,000-mile wide ball of gas, making it the second largest planet in our solar system. Believe it or not, this planet's density is less than that of water, so if you could get a swimming pool big enough, Saturn would float on it like a colossal beach ball!

Saturn's hallmark, though, is its wonderful, intricate ring system that spans a diameter more than 175,000 miles, more than half of the distance between Earth and its moon. Amazingly, the ring system is only about 10 to 15 miles thick.

The rings are made up of billions and billions of ice-covered rocks, from the size of dust grains to more than the size of your house. Most likely these rocks are the pulverized remains of one or two of Saturn's moons that were ripped apart by the planet's tremendous tidal forces.

As you gaze upon the rings, see if you can spot a black band right in the middle of the system. That gap in the rings is called Cassini's division, and it is nearly 3,000 miles wide.

Also, see if you can spot Saturn's larger moons, which look like tiny stars surrounding the planet. The brightest and biggest is Titan, over 3,200 miles in diameter. That's larger than the planet Mercury.

Observations of Titan, including those of the Cassini spacecraft and Huygens probe, which actually landed on Titan last January, show that it's a bizarre world with a heavy methane atmosphere and lakes and streams of liquid methane and other chemicals.

Saturn is so close to the Earth this week due to simple orbital mechanics. Earth is a lot closer to the sun than Saturn is and only takes one year to circle our home star, while Saturn takes almost 30 years to make its much longer circuit. As a result, once a year plus 23 days, Earth and Saturn make their closest pass to each other, something astronomers call opposition.Obviously this annual cosmic brush with Saturn is a wonderful time to observe the planet, but there's also a bonus. Since the Earth lies in a line between the sun and Saturn, the ringed wonder of our universe and our parent star are on opposite ends of the sky, hence the term opposition.The bottom line here is that Saturn is visible all night long. When the sun sets in the west, Saturn comes up in the east, and when the sun rises in the east Saturn checks out, sinking below the western horizon.Saturn is ripe for the celestial picking all night long, but be patient. Under no circumstances should you aim your telescope when it's just above the horizon. I guarantee you'll be disappointed, and if you didn't know any better you may declare your scope useless and start looking for the store receipt.The problem is really our atmosphere. Our life- giving atmosphere surrounds Earth like a shell. Because of simple geometry, when you look at any celestial object close to the horizon you're forced to look through our atmosphere to see it. Wait until at least 8 p.m. for telescoping.If you can't see Saturn all that clearly with your telescope after that, don't give up. Look at it over a series of clear nights to see if you can get a sharper focus. Even on nights when it looks like it's clear as a bell, there might be high altitude winds that can really muck things up. This is what stargazers call "bad seeing.".I don't want to come on like a used car salesman here, but this winter will be our best chance to really see Saturn's ring system for about the next eight years. That's because as Saturn orbits the sun every 29 years, the tilt of Saturn's rings change from our viewpoint on Earth.In fact, the angle is shrinking right now, and in 2009 the ring system will be "on edge." Get your telescope licks in on Saturn before it's too late!As if Saturn wasn't good enough all by itself, it's in close company with one of the prettiest star clusters in the sky. Just above Saturn is the "Beehive Cluster," a swarm of young stars about 400 light years away. If you can't quite spot the cluster with the naked eye, you'll certainly spot it withbinoculars.It's so close that it might be easy to confuse some of Saturn's moons with the stars in the Beehive.Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio on Minneapolis and author of the new book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch", available at bookstores and at his Web site