salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller welcome to eyes on the sky
what's up this week well the arguably the best planet to
view in the solar system Saturn reached opposition on July 9th
and that means that it's really an evening sky object because it's been
visible in the morning sky for a number of months now so this I have set at 10
o'clock for me at 40 degrees north latitude that means most people should
be able to see Saturn as well even if you are further north than me it ought
to be up I like to wait until Saturn is about 15 degrees above the horizon
before viewing it so when we look on stellarium at the azimuth grid you can
see that at 10 o'clock for me except maybe 16 degrees or so so that's high
enough up that you can at least start getting some decent views of it you can
view it lower than that but very often that there's so much more atmosphere
that you're looking through that the view is not quite as good as it should
be or could be I guess really it's the better way to say that so ideally we
want to look at Saturn when it is on the meridian so that means for right now we
really need to kind of go around one o'clock in the morning so kind of
late for a lot of people but that would be the best time to see because it's
gonna be about for me 27 degrees or so up actually we can look and see exactly
how high it is which click on Saturn and look over here and you can see on the
alt/az altitude side twenty six point four seven that's the best we're
gonna do and it does not get substantially better there through the
next several months unfortunately because the ecliptic stays fairly low to
the sky just based on how things are at least here in the northern hemisphere so
this is gonna be your best opportunity when it's due south the other ways that
you can get a good view of the planet you can go to my website eyesonthesky.com
go under the resources section click on the see the planets better link
and I've got a number of things that you can do to get a better view of planets
in general that are going to help you to have a better observing session of
planets so we have both Jupiter and Saturn out there if we look at about 10
o'clock or so we can see that Saturn is it's around 30 degrees away from Jupiter
so finding Saturn is not all that difficult actually to skip ahead to get
it a little bit higher up in the sky so this is right around 11 o'clock or so at
11 o'clock Jupiter is just to the right of South
and Saturn is to the left of South that 30 degrees distance you can measure by
holding your hands out like this and it's the distance across your pinky's held at
arm's length could be each of these is about 15 degrees so you can do that and
find Saturn fairly easily the other thing is look for it to be...
I would say it is technically as bright as Arcturus at about zero magnitude there
it is 0.06 and Arcturus way up here 0.15 so they're almost identical in the
magnitude the problem is you're looking through more atmosphere probably for
Saturn and as a result it may look dimmer it does for me Arcturus looks
pretty bright Saturn does not look quite as bright but finding Jupiter is simple
because it's the next brightest thing after the moon if the moon doesn't
happen to be in your sky because we're a couple weeks ahead then just look
for Jupiter towards the south and then look for Saturn it's in the
constellation of Sagittarius when we bring up those lines we can see how it
is kind of to the handle part of the teapot Antares is very close to where
Jupiter is over in Scorpius and for Sagittarius we got the Teapot right
here Saturn doesn't move a whole lot relative to Sagittarius over the next
couple of months either if we Center that and just kind of go ahead even a
couple months you can see how it just sort of sits there right by the handle
it's not gonna move substantially in order to be able to find it and it
actually doesn't move a lot relative to Jupiter they're both gonna be in the
same relative part of the sky towards us out there and then about the same
distance apart to view the planet well you're gonna
need some magnification magnification should not go crazy because if you tried
to go more than about 50 times per inch or 50 times per 25 millimeters of
aperture for your telescope you're really just magnifying mush at
that point you're not getting any substantial additional resolution on
your telescope image for observing so try to limit that unless the atmosphere
is really really really super steady then maybe you could push it up more but
go ahead and go up to the maximum that you think you can go and if it looks bad
just then keep backing off until you get a nice steady image of the planet when
you do look at it there's a number of things that you can see Titan is one of
the moons that's quite obvious because it's eight-and-a-half magnitude so
that's as bright as a lot of stars that are easily visible in most any telescope
and then we've got a couple other dimmer moons Rhea Dione and Tethys which go
around and you're gonna watch well I'm gonna show you really quickly how Titan
kind of makes this big giant loop around Saturn because Saturn's tilted right now
so the plane of the moon's orbit of Saturn are also tilted as a result so as
we kind of skip whoops let me back up I gotta Center this so as we go through
you can see how Titan makes that big giant elliptical loop around and it gets
a pretty good distance away to don't confuse it with a star and you should be
able to see those other three moons okay seeing some of the other ones might be
pretty difficult Enceladus is twelfth magnitude that's pretty difficult
Mimas is 13th magnitude good luck with that one and some of the other ones are
even dimmer than that that just gets really difficult to see some of those so
definitely those four and then of course there's the Rings the Rings are lovely
check this out isn't that amazing and people get mesmerized so much by the
Rings that forget to look at the actual planet itself don't forget to look for a
couple interesting things especially because of how the planet is notice the
shadow that can help give kind of a 3d view of it that's what
meets people look at it and they go WOW are you sure that's not a picture at the
end of your telescope no that's really the planet it's really 80 light minutes
away it which is almost like 900 million miles it's a long way off you can look
for the subtle shading and banding on the planet itself you're gonna need some
magnification for that it's not as obvious as Jupiter's bands but you can
sometimes see that but the Rings themselves are where things definitely
get interesting we can know kind of where certain rings are by their
location so it looks like there's a lot of different rings in here and there are
a number of ring features but I'm going to bring up the Wikipedia page for this
you can kind of see maybe even got a big slider here so you can see the
difference so the a ring and B ring are the biggest components and the brightest
ones so the a ring is gonna be way out here B ring is out here so if we go back
to our thing we've got a ring and then B ring this dark line in between there
that's the Cassini division so Cassini saw that and that's why we call that
that in here is the C ring that's faint or I should say really dark it's not so
much faint it's just dark and then the D ring is even inside of that I don't
think I've ever seen the D ring before so primary components really that you're
looking for an A and B ring just because when we back out and get a typical view
of what a telescope might look like you're probably looking at that and
trying to find that Cassini division if you have really really steady skies
though and you can bump up that magnification because you've got enough
aperture to do so try and look for the Encke division right here way out there
I'm gonna show this to you right there that are they called the Encke gap here on
this that's only like 200 miles wide or just over 300 kilometres wide so keep
that in mind as you look for that and realize that it might be difficult to
see something that seems big but that far away
it's really really really small but Saturn is of
course an amazing object to see we're gonna be able to see it for a couple of
months before we kind of lose it fortunately the skies get darker earlier
as we go out of summer and into fall so we can skip ahead
there's September if we back up a little bit in time you can see how even in
October we're still due south but we're not any higher the azimuth still has us
at like 27 degrees but you can find it you can see it for a number of months in
the evening definitely go do it it's the best planet to see that's all for this
week keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down so we can all
see what's up I'm David fuller wishing you clear and
dark skies