Saturn's Rings  (October 2003)

Saturn through a telescope from the driveway of our house in Cockeysville, Maryland on 2003 Oct 25 02:46 EDT (06:46 UT).  When viewed on a typical computer monitor, the apparent magnification of this image is about 900X.  Listed below are the technical details of how we obtained this image. Telescope:  Celestron C9.25 (235 mm aperture, 2350 mm focal length) Telescope mount:  Losmandy GM-8 equatorial mount with digital clock drive Camera:  Orange Micro iBot webcam with 640 x 480 pixel color CCD chip Camera coupling:  Positive projection with 15 mm Meade Super Plössl eyepiece inside Meade tele-extender yielding an additional 4X magnification Data acquisition:  Approximately 600 frames at 15 frames/second Image processing:  Aligned all 600 frames with the Registax program. Summed the 180 frames with the highest quality according to Registax. In Adobe Photoshop, adjusted the image's contrast and orientation.

Going Full Tilt As Saturn moves along its orbit around the Sun, different parts of the planet's rings face us observers on Earth.  In the spring of 2003, the underside of the rings were maximally tilted toward Earth, resulting in the best exposure of Saturn's southern hemisphere.  This event occurs at a particular position of Saturn's orbit around the Sun.  Therefore, it happens about once every 30 years, the time it takes for Saturn to go once around the Sun.    In the spring, we didn't have a telescope large enough to observe Saturn's details.  After getting our new telescope later in the year, we waited for autumn, when Saturn returned to the evening sky.    From Earth-based telescopes, Saturn's rings have three components.  Two components are visible in our image here.  The separation between the two is called Cassini's division and is about as wide as the continental United States. The third component of Saturn's rings, not visible here, requires a larger telescope to visualize. ( back to home page)

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