Saturn's atmosphere is a bit like Jupiter's except that it is colder and the cloud layers are thicker.  It is not a particularly dense planet either, the mass is so spread out that on average it's less dense than water!  Like Jupiter, it also seems to have big storms raging in its atmosphere and around the equator winds sweep about at 1,800 km/h.

The most famous feature(s) about Saturn though are it's rings.   They were first spotted by the great Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei but it was a few decades later that Christiaan Huygens (Dutch astronomer) discovered that they were seperate from the planet.  Then Cassini discovered the Cassini division and later on it was discoverd that there are actually many rings and that they are made of rock and ice.  The rings are quite insubstantial; at some points they may be only 1km thick!   Saturn also has a magnetic field 1,000 times stronger than Earth's.

Saturn's 22 moons are : Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimitheus, Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Thethys, Telesto, Calypso, Dione, Helene, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus and Phoebe and 4 other out moons.  The most important one is Titan and scientists hope to find out what the Earth was like long ago through studying it.   It's also a rather large moon, being bigger than Mercury.  Titan is the only moon in the Solar System to have an atmosphere.  Scientists recently discovered day clouds on Titan and this adds to substantial evidence suggesting it has clouds, rain and seas like Earth.   The European Space Agency is planning a mission (the Huygens) to Titan to find out more about it.

Galileo Galilei discovered Saturn's rings in 1610 and it was in 1659 that Chistiaans Huygens realised they weren't physically attatched to Saturn.  Then in 1676 Italian-French astronomer Jean Dominique Cassini discovered the Cassini division in the rings.  The first pictures of Saturn's polar regions were taken in 1979 by the Pioneer 11 and a year later, in 1980, Voyager (the probe, not the Star Trek spaceship) took 17,500 colour pictures of the planet, measured wind speeds in Saturn's equatorial region and measured Titan's size. Voyager 2 passed even closer than Voyager in 1981.   On the 15th October 1997 the Cassini spacecraft was launched towards Saturn and it's expected to arrive in 2004.