A quick quiz question for amateur stargazers: How many moons does Saturn have?

If you answered 18, you’re... about three-fifths right. There are 18 named moons. I didn't know that until I read it in a dentist's office while waiting for a root canal. Many of them were discovered recently, and there are an estimated dozen more that haven’t been located or labeled yet.

Saturns moons range in size from Titan, the second-largest moon in the solar system (which has its own atmosphere), to Pan, which is barely more than an orbiting asteroid.

Certain Saturnian moons, such as Tethys, have their own moons -- or at least smaller moons that share their orbit. Imagine how complicated the tides would be on Saturn if it had surf.

The most distant of Saturn’s moons is Phoebe. This desolate satellite is little more than drifting debris from the Kuiper Belt, an asteroid which scientists believe was snared into Saturn’s orbit several billion years ago.

Some of you may be familiar with the term, “Shepherd moon.” I hadn't heard of one until the early 1990s when Enya released an album by the same name. I never stopped to think what a "shepherd moon" was though. I figured it was something that guided shepherds and their flocks across the pastures in the evening.

Actually, shepherd moons act as stabilizing forces for the rings of Jovian planets. "What's a Jovian planet?" you may be asking. It's a fancy term for all of the “super-sized” outer planets, including Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. Another thing I recently learned is that they all have Saturn-like rings too.

The nature of shepherd moons has largely remained a mystery since the rings of Saturn were discovered by Galileo in 1610. Moons such as Prometheus and Pandora apparently tug at, and help to stretch out the various bands of ice particles and cosmic rubble. Initially, there were only three bands of Saturnian rings known to astronomers, but in recent years many additional rings have been discovered. They are much more faint, and not visible to the naked eye.

One thin band, known as the "F ring," is composed of five braided strands. Some of Saturn's rings actually have “spokes,” fine radial strands that are probably held in place by electromagnetic fields.

The complexities of such an alien world truly boggle the mind. We learned a great deal more about Saturn’s rings and shepherd moons when the $3 billion-dollar Cassini space probe blasted its way into Saturn’s orbit a few years back.

The probe was a remarkable feat of engineering. It carried two computers, state-of-the-art telescopes and monitoring equipment capable of transmitting data across the solar system. When it passed within 1,300 miles of Phoebe, the probe relayed photos of this meteor-pocked moon back to Earth. They were the clearest, most amazing images yet from an alien world almost two billion miles from the earth.

The nuclear-powered Cassini probe may be the most sophisticated robotic spacecraft every built – more so than the Martian probes that have been exploring the surface of the Red Planet. After firing its rockets for more than 50 minutes, it locked into Saturn's orbit and hung out for a four-year visit. During that time, it conducted a detailed study of the relationship between Saturn’s moons and its rings, and sent back high-resolution photos and videos.

When I was a boy, I was really passionate about astronomy. Back then, the best visuals I could get were artist's renderings in Time-Life books. Today, it’s amazing that such complex technical accomplishments don't spark greater public interest. Perhaps that lost sense of wonder and excitement will return and be reinvigorated with some new space mission in the future (a manned trip to Mars?), much the way the Apollo moonshots did in the 1960s.