Saturn

About the object

Saturn, the planet with the most prominent rings in the Solar System. The rings are made of ice and rock from dust grains to house-sized blocks, only tens of metres thick yet stretching for hundreds of thousands of kilometres. For a small telescope Saturn is a hard target: the disk is tiny, the rings thinner still, and everything depends on steady air. Even a small device, though, shows clearly how the ring tilt changes from year to year.

Apparent size in the sky: ≈ 17″ (диск).

How it was shot

Everything here was shot with a DWARF Mini smart telescope from a balcony in a city in Ukraine: light-polluted sky, only the eastern half of it visible, and a roof overhang that cuts off the south. Saturn was observed over 4 nights (3 nights in August and 1 in October) in 15 sessions, 5,619 frames with exposures from 8 ms to 1 s. For the Moon, the Sun and the planets the telescope records short video and the sharpest frames are stacked, so a few good minutes of steady air matter more than hours of exposure.

Saturn in the night log: 20 August, 25 August, 28 August, 4 October.

How it went

The planet was a test of the DWARF Mini limits: fifteen sessions with exposures from thousandths of a second up to a second, looking for the point where the disk is not yet clipped but the rings are already visible. A frame from such a device will not show the Cassini Division, but the shape and tilt of the rings come out confidently. What mattered most was altitude above the roofs: the lower the planet, the more the air smears the rings.