A BILLION MILES AWAY, AND YET SO CLOSE.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

It is out of this world both by definition and description, a place of ice geysers and methane rivers and winds that make a hurricane seem like a summer breeze.

And although it is more than a billion miles away, the ringed planet Saturn and its moons are coming into clearer focus than ever, thanks to a pair of spacecraft known as Cassini-Huygens that arrived at the planet more than a year ago. The pictures they have sent back have wowed the science community. Now the average skywatcher can see them from a ringside seat thanks to "Saturn: New Discoveries," a show that premiered Saturday at the Science Factory Planetarium.

Using pictures from NASA and the European Space Agency, the 50-minute program takes viewers on a tour of the Saturnian system. From the sandstone-colored bands of the planet's fiercely windy upper atmosphere to the icy surface of its most distant moon, Iapetus, it is a spin through an alien place on a very distant shore.

And even though the show is about a planet, it clearly has a star.

"I liked the rings," said 5-year-old Michael Stone, echoing a common theme among the show's first audience.

Planetarium director Sue Peterson said the show gives people a chance to see some of the amazing discoveries the spacecraft have made.

"The reality is with Cassini up there, there are just so many fascinating discoveries that we're making," she said. "We're learning things about the rings that we never knew and the interaction of the moons and the rings and finding things like ice volcanoes on Titan and and ice geysers on Enceladus, and it looks like Phoebe is a captured comet. It's just such awesome stuff."

All those moons make for a smorgasbord of extraterrestrial geography. Nine-year-old Kyler Hinkle said that even though Mercury is his favorite planet, he likes Saturn's variety as well. "I just like it because of its rings and it has over 23 moons," he said.

The show's otherworldly images are just a sampling of the visual bounty beamed back to Earth by the Cassini orbiter and its Huygens lander. The spacecraft have been probing Saturn, its intricate rings and its stable of satellites ever since their arrival at the gas giant in July 2004, sending back dazzling images of perhaps the most intriguing planetary target in the solar system.

Cassini-Huygens is considered the most ambitious planetary exploration ever. The spacecraft already have provided scientists with a lifetime's worth of data to analyze, and Cassini will continue to weave its complex orbit among the Saturnian moons at least until July 2008 and perhaps longer.

The mission hit what might be its high point just six months after the spacecrafts' arrival. Almost a year ago to the day, the Huygens (pronounced HOY-gens) lander separated from the orbiter and parachuted onto the surface of Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons and bigger than the planet Mercury.

After a 2 1/2 -hour descent, it sent back data and photos for more than an hour after a soft landing on what has to be the strangest place ever visited by an earthly spacecraft. It settled with a soft splat onto a surface with the consistency of wet sand, possibly made up of semi-solid methane or ethane at a temperature more than 300 degrees below zero.

The pictures of an orange-hued surface beneath a similarly colored sky are perhaps the most striking sent back and are featured in the planetarium show, which is produced by Peterson and her staff.

"It is so awesome to get this incredible clarity when we're looking at a world that is hundreds of millions of miles away," she said.

IF YOU GO

What: "Saturn: New Discoveries"

Where: The Science Factory Planetarium next to Autzen Stadium 

When: Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. through March

Cost: $4 per person; $3 seniors and children under 3; free for members

Ages: Recommended for ages 10 and up

CAPTION(S):

The spacecraft Cassini captured images of Saturn in October 2004 that have been composed into the largest color view of the planet ever made.