What if Earth had Saturn’s rings?

A visual trek

When I look at the sky every time, I wonder how it would be if there were to be a second sun. Or rings! I plugged in Saturn’s magnificent set of rings on Earth and visualised using Celestia, one of my all time favourite space simulation/planetarium software. I’m taking care to not mention any date or time of the simulation and not get into the science of why we don’t have one.

This is how it looks -

Earth, with rings!

12,000+ km out

6,000+ km out

500+ km out, over the Red Sea with view of Africa. (Visible: The river Nile and Sahara)

Those dark lines are the shadows of the rings over Earth’s surface. It becomes cooler when you see it from the surface itself.

With the rings on, I had some issues with Celestia rendering clouds and the surface textures at ground level. I’ve either cut-out the surface or taken images at around 1km height.

Somewhere above the Arabian Sea

The sky over Bangalore, India. (And that’s the sun at the top!)

The night sky over New York

Look! We don’t need a Sundial!

The rings cast a shadow on the surface because the Earth wobbles on its axis and the rings expand from a thin line (when they are perpendicular to the sun) upto covering the Northern Hemisphere over time (when there’s maximum tilt) and back, and then repeats over the Southern Hemisphere.

Here’s a video of a simulation

Celestia is a brilliant piece of work and is fully open source. It’s a treat for skywatchers and astro-lovers alike and has quite a lot of data with more addons at celestiamotherlode.net.

Here are a couple of more pictures -

The International Space Station

Near the equator when the rings are almost perpendicular to the Sun. The full shadow just a few kilometers across.

The Earth (marked) still looks the same from Mars. None of the beauty mattered!

Thanks to Shrikrishna Holla and Swaroop Rao for reading drafts for this.