Saturn's Rings Nearly Edge-On

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to see any planets, but Saturn is finally up in the sky at a reasonable hour! Saturn is always beautiful, but now is a special time. The rings of Saturn are approaching nearly edge-on from Earth’s perspective. For such a sharp angle I’m very pleased I was able to capture a gap in the rings and the planet, I even see a hint of the Cassini gap in the rings.

Tonight I used a 3x barlow lens, ZWO ASI 290MC camera and my 10” dobsonian telescope. I used a 5ms exposure and 500 gain and focused as best I could on Saturn itself. I limited the camera field of view to allow the FireCapture software to take more frames per second, and ended up taking about 8000 frames while tracking the planet by hand.

I stacked 70% of the frames in Autostakkert and sharpened with wavelets in Registax.

This actually ended up being one of my better photos of Saturn, which is surprising because when I took the photo it was relatively low in thy sky. I must have been blessed with especially steady skies.

I’ll be revisiting Saturn more in the next few months, but I’m excited for Jupiter and Mars to come up soon too!