The history of Saturn
It is hard to say when the planet Saturn was discovered. The Romans nicknamed the planet after the god of harvest Saturnus same as the greek god Kronos. Nobody realized the planet had rings until Galileo first turned his rudimentary telescope on the planet in 1610. Of course, Galileo didn't realize what he was looking at, and thought the rings were large moons on either side of the planet. It wasn't until Christian Huygens used a better telescope to see that they were actually rings. It is said that Saturn collided with one of its moons over one hundred million years ago and the debris from the moon was pulled to the planet and created Saturns rings. Huygens was also the first to discover Saturn's largest moon Titan.
http://ael.gsfc.nasa.gov/saturnHistory.shtml
