Saturn In The Same Place As The Moon

Nah it would just turn to night, you would not get to see the solar corona which is the fortuitous result of the coincedence that the moon subtends almost exactly the same angle as the sun as a result of their relaive sizes and distances.

Saturn is enormous and would subtend a huge angle at the range of the moon approx 247,000 miles.

You might get some back illumination of the gas clouds of Saturn and the rings might be spectacular if at an angle to earth, so I will modify my "Nah" and say it would be interesting after all

Such an eclipse would last a long time however you would probably only be viewing it from the top of very high mountains as the graviational tides would have scoured the rest of the earth clean

Precisely the orbits of all of the inner planets would be complely devsated very likely we would be thrown out of the solar system.

However the premise is that Saturn just appears at our orbit and in reality we would be orbiting Saturn as a moon at that point in which case the tides would be horrific.

Just after the earth formed the moon was only at about a distance of 10000 to 14000 miles (from memory I might be off a bit but it was very very close) it would have looked like Mike's post and the tides were truly staggering back then some 4 and half billion years back.

Every year the moon gets about 4 cm further away as a reult of tidal friction, the earth's rotation slows a bit and the moon gets accelerated by the gravity of the leading edge of the tidal bulges.

I wrote a spreadseet calculation in 1989 which could work out the distance to the moon at any point in history between 4000 odd years BC and some 20000 years AD it was about 50,000 spreadsheet cells for the model but the basic calulation was quite simple.

The orbit is not perfectly circular it has considerable variance, hence sometimes we get annular eclipses (anul as in anus) eclipses where the sun appears as a ring raher than being fully eclipsed.