If you ever find yourself floating above the clouds of Saturn, gazing upon the planet’s magnificent rings, you might feel like you need to get your eyes checked. Even at noon, when the Sun is highest in the sky, the view will look as dim as the minutes before sunrise or after sunset here on Earth.

That’s because Saturn is almost 10 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. At that distance, the Sun shines only about one percent as bright as it does on Earth. And that presents some problems for spacecraft that travel to Saturn.

For one thing, they can’t use solar power. They’d need huge arrays of solar cells, which would make a craft far too heavy and expensive. Instead, Saturn-bound missions are nuclear powered.

For another, it’s hard to take good pictures. A craft has to leave the shutter open for a long time to properly expose an image. At the speeds a craft is moving, that blurs the shot. The solution is to turn either the camera or the entire spacecraft to stay focused on the target.

No spacecraft are operating at Saturn now. The next one is scheduled for launch in a few years. It’ll ferry a small helicopter to Saturn’s big moon Titan – under the faint light of the distant Sun.

Saturn appears near our own Moon early tomorrow. It looks like a bright star, standing just below the Moon at dawn. The planet fades from view as the sky brightens – under the full glory of the nearby Sun.

Script by Damond Benningfield