oOo
I do not know what to say with certainty in a case so strange, unlooked for and novel. The shortness of the time, the phenomenon without parallel, the weakness of the reasoning power and the fear of erring render me greatly confused. – Galileo Galilei, 1612
Galileo Galilei was the first to look at Saturn through a telescope in 1610. He initially thought Saturn might be a triple star and in a letter described it by the glyph oOo, only to look back a couple of years later and discover that the two smaller shapes had disappeared. It took astronomers nearly 50 years of observations to figure out Saturn’s rings. Christiaan Huygens’ Systema Saturnium, published in 1659, includes a diagram of thirteen key observations of Saturn, including Galileo’s. This work is my homage to that moment of transition, when Saturn’s rings were still unknown, un-figured, before technology changed the face of Saturn forever. It re-creates the thirteen depictions of Saturn from Huygens diagram. I made the drawings in 2018, and in 2022 adding an animation of the drawings – actualising the motion implied in Huygen’s original sequence.


