Saturn

2024

In 2024, the view from earth is almost parallel to the ring plane. The moment of exact parallelity cannot be observed, as it happens during conjunction, afterwards, the tilt will increase again, and in the future years the rings will cover more and more of the northern hemisphere.

Saturn moons / transits and shadow transits

The nearly ring-parallel view brings the opportunity to observe moon and moon shadow transits. Except Titan, Saturns moons are rather small, so capturing them with a 6" scope is a challenging task, which only succeeds in nights with above average seeing. Even then, the signal barely surpasses the noise level.

Tethys transit 2024-07-31

In the early morning of the 31th of July, Tethys passed before Saturn exactly in front of the very thin ring shadow, so both moon and shadow are discernible, although one has to look very close. In the aninmation on the right, watch out for the two faint spots among the noise which show a synchronized and regular movement :-)

2021

For some years, Saturn slowly moved through the region with the lowest declination (Scorpio, Sagittarius), and its low maximum altitude made it difficult to achieve a sufficient image quality. On one summer evening, I had some luck. Although the Enke gap cannot be resolved with my 6" scope, a hint of it nevertheless can be seen as brightness dip in the A ring.

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