Saturn is about to be the brightest thing you are not looking at

For the next couple of weeks there is a plan worth making, and it costs nothing. On the night of the fourth of October, Saturn reaches what astronomers call opposition. That is the moment the Earth passes directly between Saturn and the Sun, so the planet rises in the east as the Sun sets in the west, stays up the whole night, and shines at its brightest and closest for the entire year. You do not need to circle the exact date. The evenings on either side are almost as good, and the nights leading up to it are a slow crescendo you can watch build.

how to find it, with nothing but your eyes

Wait until it is properly dark and look towards the east and south east. Saturn will be the steady, buttery, faintly golden point that is not twinkling. That last part is the trick. Stars twinkle because they are so far away they arrive as single pinpoints of light that the air can jostle about. A planet is close enough to be a tiny disc, and a disc does not flicker in the same way. So when you are trying to tell which bright thing is the planet, look for the one holding still. That is Saturn, keeping its own counsel while the stars around it fidget.

You do not need to know a single constellation to do this. You need a clear-ish sky, a few minutes for your eyes to adjust, and the patience to stand outside when the sensible part of you wants to be indoors.

A planet is the light in the sky that refuses to twinkle. Find the steady one, and you have found your way to the outer solar system from your own back step.

the rings are coming back

Here is the part that makes this year worth the coat. Saturn's rings are not fixed from our point of view. As the planet and the Earth travel their orbits, we see the rings at different tilts, and every so often they turn almost exactly edge on to us and all but vanish, a bright planet suddenly stripped of the thing it is famous for. That happened last year. The rings thinned to a hairline and, in many small telescopes, simply disappeared.

They are opening again now. Slowly, a little more each month, tilting back towards us so that their broad face catches the sunlight. Through a modest telescope, the kind a patient beginner might own, they are once more unmistakably there: not a smudge, not a guess, but a ring, hanging in the black around a small pale ball, exactly as the pictures promised and somehow still a shock when it is your own eye at the lens.

why bother

You could ask what the point is. Saturn will be there next year and the year after, and the tilt will keep changing whether or not you go and look. That is true, and it is also the reason to go. The sky is the one appointment that keeps itself. It asks nothing of you and notices nothing about you. It will not be offended if you stay in, and it will not congratulate you if you go out. It simply carries on, vast and indifferent and running exactly on time, and once in a while it lets you stand underneath it and understand, for a few honest minutes, how small the day's troubles actually are.

So on some clear evening in the next fortnight, go out. Find the steady golden light in the east. Know that it is a whole other world, ringed and cold and nine hundred million miles off, and that the light landing in your eye left it more than an hour ago. Then go back inside and put the kettle on. The universe will keep your place.