Ever since the astronomy bug bit me I’ve been hooked on Saturn. It is by far my favorite backyard telescope target, even more than the four moons of Jupiter or the stars of Trapezium (four of them) inside the heart of the Orion Nebula.

It takes Saturn 29 years to orbit the sun. Twice in that cycle it comes closest to earth for the best viewing (last summer was one of those times). Now, with the Cassini probe soon to be literally orbiting Saturn, the pictures should be awesome! (See Cassini orbit insertion.)

Be still my beating heart as we consider what Cassini is going to show us starting with the first pictures to be sent back late Wednesday and early Thursday morning. It takes 1 hour and 23 minutes for a message from Cassini to reach Earth. At precisely 10:56 p.m. (EDT) the orbiter will fire its rockets and begin to brake in preparation for entering orbit around Saturn.

I’ve written on Saturn before, specifically how it's the "lord of the rings." I’ve characterized Saturn's gossamer bands as the best looking dirt and ice in the universe, a mere 30-50 feet thick in some places, with a width of around 300,000 miles.

One of the questions the astronomy community hopes the Cassini project will more fully answer is how these rings appear so bright from such a great distance (Jupiter has rings and so does Neptune and Uranus, but try to see them with an amateur telescope – you can't.)

As we begin our coverage of Cassini's exploration of Saturn, let’s make a comparison. Below is one of the "best" pictures to date of the rings. It is a "detail" of the rings and was taken just last May by NASA's Hubble telescope. Let’s see what images the orbiting satellite Cassini sends us on Thursday morning and compare them to the Hubble picture.

One final point. See the large gap, or break in the rings? This gap is called the Cassini division and is named after the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini who discovered it in 1676 and in whose honor the satellite and current mission was named.

Be sure to read other Monitor coverage of Cassini: A slingshot ride through Saturn's marvel of ice, dust; Rings, as you've never seen 'em

Remember as a child walking by some big old mansion just around the block from where you lived. You’d never been inside. It loomed large in your young imagination, beckoning.

Did anyone live there? If the door suddenly swung open, what would it look like inside? Should you go up and ring the doorbell and ask if you could come in?

And then one day, actually one night, Halloween, and a chance to go inside fell in your lap. You were brave enough to go up, ring the doorbell, stammer out “trick or treat,” and hopefully sneak a peek inside. You were asked to come inside.

Well, the galactic equivalent of that childhood experience happens next week. After a seven-year space flight covering more than 2.2 billion miles, the Cassini space probe approaches Saturn, our solar system’s second largest planet.

The small craft begins a four-year tour of duty circling Saturn. It will orbit the ringed planet 76 times, studying 7 of the 31 known moons circling the lord of the rings. Cassini will make 45 flybys of Titan, the Saturn moon of most interest to astronomers. Liquids have been detected on the giant moon’s surface (it’s bigger than the planet Mercury) which might sustain “life." Cassini has 12 different sets of scientific instruments crammed on board. Telescopes and cameras can read nearly every wavelength from radio to ultraviolet.

And just like it took courage to go up and ring the doorbell of that neighborhood mansion on Halloween night, NASA scientists and program coordinators have to summon up courage as they send the probe on a close encounter with Saturn’s rings. Cassini will literally pass through gaps in the rings twice in a 96-minute engine burn before it settles into orbit around Saturn. Bear in mind the rings are made up of dust and ice (some chunks as big as a house) kept in rotation by gravity and the odd small meteor or orbiting “shepherd moon” sweeping out debris between the rings.

Questions abound!

• Just what makes up the interior of the planet?
• Does it have a rocky core? Is it metallic?
• How powerful is its magnetosphere (a magnetic shield that affects, some would say protects, a planets atmosphere from harmful solar radiation)?
• What is the gravitational interplay between Saturn’s many moons and its prominent ring system? By studying the rings close up and how they formed will we unlock further clues in planet formation throughout our galaxy and in galaxies beyond our own? Cassini will let us do this at different wavelengths.
• What about the odd auroras observed on Saturn, what kind of magnetic force causes them?

And then there’s all that dust and ice circling the planet, making those beautiful, sunlight reflecting rings. What are they made of? Does the material come from our galaxy or, perhaps a supernova exploding millions, maybe billions of years ago, before being sucked up in the gravitational interplay between Saturn, it’s moons, our solar system's biggest planet Jupiter, and the sun?

For the next month this blog will “grab the rings,” reporting and reflecting on what we discover about this gas-giant in our corner of the cosmos.

Privacy in personal communications has always been well-guarded. 18th century European royal clerics would emboss envelopes with specialized wax seals to ensure a message arrived unopened to its recipient. The US Postal Service's earliest laws famously assert that opening another person’s mail is a felony. However, in the newest form of communication, e-mails, privacy appears a bit more elusive.

To many, e-mails seem the most confidential of correspondence. They are passed along anonymous servers until they reach their intended addresses. However, if these servers were likened to human hands, passing the message from one person to another, and the e-mail likened to a letter, without the protection of a stamp or envelope, a more worrisome picture emerges.

The US Patriot Act awakened many Americans to the public nature of e-mail correspondence. Section 216 expanded the use of trap-and-trace and pen-register devices from telephones to a variety of digital communications, including e-mail, web surfing, and instant messaging. Suddenly, it emerged that e-mail is actually the most public of personal communication forms, easily accessed along the various steps of server “hands” that pass it along to its destination.

The release of Google’s free e-mail service, "Gmail", raised even more debate when the Web company announced that it would index the e-mails of its customers. Suddenly people were aware of the possibility that their e-mails could be searched for key words, and sorted and classified by their content.

Although Google is most likely not the only e-mail service provider to index their customers' e-mails, (the US government has a much more intrusive program, called Carnivore, that flags e-mails as they move between mail servers), the publicity surrounding Gmail’s release heightened awareness over the very public nature of e-mails.

To return to an analogy made earlier, if a person were able to provide a virtual envelope and stamp to protect the contents of their e-mails, it would be much more difficult for unwanted eyes to see the data within the e-mail. This exact service lies at the heart of encrypted e-mails.

PGP Corporation is a leading provider of encryption software. Its program, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), provides the user with two virtual keys. One unlocks the code that the other key makes. A user of PGP would send correspondents the public key in order to send messages – only those people who have the key can send the user an encrypted message. The user keeps the other key in order to decrypt messages sent by someone using the public key. There are also other types of encrypted e-mail, such as GnuPG, which provides a free (open source) version that is compatible with PGP, but not as well-developed.

Encrypted e-mail does have some obvious drawbacks. Not enough people are currently using it to make it effective. It also limits what was once a very open communication system. Gone are the days where a person could post their e-mail address on an open forum for those who are interested in an e-mail conversation (though, thanks to spam, a person would be unwise to post their e-mail in a public forum anyway).

Encrypted e-mail offers users the possibility of privacy in a virtual world of increasingly public communication. Though it isn't as flashy as waxed seals, encrypted e-mail is a 21st-century stamp to make sure personal business stays that way.

How would you like to be invisible? In the Harry Potter way, not in the 'wallflower at a party' way.

It could happen. The BBC reports that Prof. Susumu Tachi, the inventor of an invisibility cloak, has a new project. He wants to make it possible to have see-through walls, so that when you're inside your house, it looks like you don't have any walls, but from the outside, the walls still appear to be there.

Actually, it's all done with a little legerdemain, and the help of a computer. Professor Tachi's cloak works by projecting an image onto itself of what is behind the wearer. A computer generates the image that is projected, so the viewer effectively sees "through" the cloak.

The key development of the cloak, however, was the development of a new material called retro-reflectum. "This material allows you to see a three-dimensional image," Professor Tachi said. "This material is the key to our technology." There are many potential uses of the cloak, ranging from espionage and military purposes to helping pilots see through the floor of the cockpit to the runway below.

There are questions about how it will be used, of course. We all want to make sure that such a cloak is not used for nafarious purposes. Criminals, spies, etc. would love to get their hands on such a cloak.

Good heavens, it might even prompt someone in Hollywood to make another "Porky's" movie or "American Pie IV." But let's not go there. In my case, I would be more worried about the see-through wall. I can just see my two-year old daughter, Peri, thinking she's outside and heading off on a tear to jump in our blow-up pool. Ouch.

Now that Venus’s moment in the sun ... well, it’s 6.4 hours of transit ... is over, don’t let this much awaited event slip out of your mental orbit.

Truth be told, the black punch-out in the smiley face of our solar system’s heat source that millions witnessed on Tuesday is such a simple yet profound image, that I hope it ripens into a much more lasting consideration of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

“Visually, Venus resembled a large, perfectly round sunspot,” writes Astronomy Magazine. And my response to that accurate, if understated description is: "Oh, yeah, it was that simple - just an image. And E=MC2 is only an equation.'

Since Einstein's famous equation, physics has become cosmology and cosmology has become physics.
By the simple act of watching the image of Venus replicate a moving eye-patch across a giant fireball I trust that cosmologists sprang up all over the world as well.

The rise of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, accompanied by a technological revolution in instrumentation, created information out of not only visible light, (which is the light by which we watched the transit of Venus) but also radio waves and microwaves, infrared and ultraviolet light, and X-ray and gamma rays. Einstein's equations opened humanity's eyes to a whole new universe. But the sheer mathematics of it risked turning the starry night into a nexus, not of infinite wonder (or terror), but cold, unrelenting calculations.

And then along comes a unique event like the transit of Venus. The experience triggered in me memories of the Perseid meteor shower in summer. At first, the meteors are quite visible and just seeing them is enough. But then the imagination asks: Where did they come from? What are they made of? How did someone know they would arrive at just this time and in just this place out of the vastness of the cosmos?

Seeing this one slice of Venus's orbit pass in front of the Sun easily suggests our own Earth's orbit around the Sun. The more one studies the orbits of planets, the gravitational pull of the Sun, the fact that our solar system acts like a planet in our Milky Way galaxy, and that our galaxy works in turn like a planet around other galaxies, and then again as a cluster of galaxies around other clusters of galaxies, our humanity impels us to stop and ponder our place in it all.

By this very act of pondering we gain some dominion over the infinite, how we can feel at home in our universe with its more than 100 billion galaxies, each with its billions of stars – one transit at a time.

Whether you were one of the millions who watched part, or even most of the transit, the Internet now lets the awe of seeing Venus move across the sun fix itself in your imagination through lasting images from around the globe. Here are some great websites for looking at photos of the transit. Use them as a vestibule to further thought adventures about time, space, and consciousness.

P.S. Venus was easy to spot with the naked eye - properly protected. It's diameter was 1/32 (about 3 percent) of the Sun's. If you had a friend with a telescope, or went to a public viewing spot, it was seen easily, at all magnifications. I had recommended for those who wanted to watch the transit online that there would be webcasts available. I listed The European Southern Observatory’s site. Many webcasts of the transit were unavailable or extremely slow due to high traffic. The ESO reports it was getting 1,500 hits per second about a half hour after the transit began. Sorry about that.

Ever wonder what it might be like if you tried to rely solely on blogs to get your news each day? (That's not a totally silly question - you are, after all, reading this blog). Steve Outing, senior news editor at the Poynter.org site, writes about one man who undertook this experiment, public relations executive Steve Rubel. For an entire week, Mr. Rubel did his best to avoid all other forms of media (quite a feat in the US, a media-drenched country), and surfed only from blog to blog to gather information. He didn't even click on links to news stories on other sites.

When the week was over, Outing e-mailed him 20 questions about items in the news from the past week. Rubel was able to answer 12 of them.

While knowing why President Bush hired a criminal lawyer last week, and the official reasons cited for George Tenet's resignation from the CIA, Rubel missed actor Daniel Radcliffe's statement that he thinks his Harry Potter character will die at the end of the J.K. Rowling book series. He didn't catch ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's admission that he tried heroin and was a cocaine user. And he missed more obscure stories, such as one of Seattle's famed monorail trains catching fire.

Well, I think he did pretty well. I knew about Radcliffe's statement, but I didn't hear about McCartney's drug admissions, and I'm buried in the news all day. Outing's piece is a very interesting perspective on the role blogs increasingly play in terms of delivering the news each day.

Meanwhile, have you ever heard of a plog? Basically, a plog is a weblog used by a team of people working on a project to keep each other updated. Michael Shrage of MIT wrote about them in "The virtues of chit-chat." Word now comes that Amazon.com will try to take advantage of the blogging movement by topping its home page with a personalized 'Plog,' a blog-style feature that links to recommended products and provides relevant information," reports ClickZNews.

"Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things," the company says on its site. "Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog."

Or this

While blogs are usually highly personal diaries produced by an individual and read by others, the Amazon version is produced by a company (or a company's technology) and each version is personalized for just one individual.

So what we're basically talking about here is an ad weblog made just for moi. Hmmm. I'm not too sure what I need in my life right now is yet another way for it to be consumerized.

I heard Carly Fiorina speak at an Comdex convention in Las Vegas about 18 months ago. She was in the midst of shepherding a rough merger of her company, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq. Yet she seemed to relish talking about the future of HP. She showed us many of the then-unseen commercials that have become familiar: the crook who is seemingly picked up by a mouse and deposited in a police van, etc. Her performance, given in the midst of a pressure-packed situation at her company, was impressive.

Now, a year and half later, after HP increased net income in its last quarter by 34 percent on a record total revenue of $20 billion (a 12 percent increase over the same period last year), Charles Cooper of CNet.com wonders why "Carly keeps getting the big dis." (Meanwhile, Ms. Fiorina has decided to pick a fight with Dell computers. HP's strategy for challenging Dell: "selling PCs without worrying about profit.")

Fiorina still catches an awful lot of flak--some of it deserved; much of it not--for her handling of the job. But I don't think that any of the talk has dented her sense of self-esteem. After all, this is someone with a pretty large ego--and much ambition. If the HP-Compaq combination proves itself, Fiorina will be written up in history books as the executive who rescued HP from a rendezvous with mediocrity.

So why do so many people tend to dismiss the job Fiorina has done? Mr. Cooper has an idea - would she be looked on differently if her name was Charlie instead of Carly? In the testosterone world of technology and business, it seems Fiorina's gender might be a problem for some of the old guard in the industry.