This time of the year we are privileged to observe what I believe is the most beautiful object to view through one of our large telescopes here in Tenerife. We have all seen it in photos on media but the first time one sees Saturn live it does really have the wow effect.
Humans have been looking at Saturn since we looked up to the heavens, we observed it as a slightly yellow wandering star. It wasn’t until the 17th century in 1610 when Galileo built his telescope that it was seen as different. Galileo’s telescope was not powerful enough to distinguish the rings and he thought that the rings were two moons sitting on each side of the planet like ears.
Forty five years later in 1655 a Dutch astronomer called Christiaan Huygens using a telescope with a 50 time magnification spotted the “ears” were flat rings. Another 30 years later the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini unravelled the complexity of the rings and the gap in the rings that is named after him the Cassini division.
Both these scientists were linked with discoveries of Saturn and the NASA spacecraft sent on a mission to discover more of Saturn in 2004 named after them. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft went on a 1.4 billion mile journey to send back photos of Saturn. It takes 80 minutes for one of the photos to reach us by radio waves. The Cassini mission has taught us a lot more about the composition of the rings and why they shine so brightly reflected by the sun.
The rings are composed of ice and range from small ice cubes up to the size of icebergs, they travel around the planet at a tremendous speed constantly bumping against each other breaking the particles apart and exposing fresh ice therefore maintaining its high reflection of the sun. Without this fast orbit of the rings around Saturn and the constant collisions the ice would become covered in space dust and we wouldn’t be able to see them from Earth. This wonderful natural phenomenon is around 300,000km across and varies in thickness between 10m and a kilometre. The angle of the planet as seen from Earth allows us to see the rings.
There is a lot of media speculation that the rings of Saturn are disappearing which is not entirely true. They are becoming less visible as the angle of Saturn changes from our view of it from Earth, so as the angle of the planet from our perception changes the rings will become less visible and possibly not visible at all next year until 2026. Already we can see less of the rings than we saw last year but they are still a beautiful sight.
I have attached a photo we took of Saturn in 2018. The tilt of the planet was greater than it is now and the rings were much more visible. Of course astrophotography does reveal a lot more colour and detail than our eyes see through the same telescope. For this type of planetary photography we need to have telescopes with long focal lengths or we use a Barlow lens which effectively increases the focal length. Our large computerised telescopes we use on our stargazing excursions in Teide National Park here in Tenerife are ideally suited and the photo I show attached was taken with one of our two large 12 inch Dobsonian telescopes and a two times Barlow lens to double its focal length. As you can see from the photos we attach a ZWO CMOS camera directly to the telescope via a two times Barlow lens to a laptop which uses software to download hundreds of images of Saturn discarding the unclear images and stacking the better ones to end up with a perfect photo of Saturn.
There are lots more opportunities to come along with us on one of our highly rated sunset and stargazing excursions and to wonder at the marvel of Saturn and its rings plus of course see spectacular sunsets and the beautiful clear night sky we get here in Tenerife. See the constellations and milky way and observe all the deep sky objects though our telescopes. Look at Galaxies Nebulae star clusters and have great photos taken of yourself under the pristine skies by our professional photographers all free of charge a memory of a night you will always remember.
See you soon!
Written by Mike Price
