Saturn, the rings and Titan!

[virtualpilot45]

Having managed to wake myself up at a time earlier than 8 o'clock(!) I managed to bring my telescope outside and set it up in around 10 mins, making it ready for use at 6:15am. The house seemed freezing anyway so I didn't really give it much time to cool down, but I started looking for Saturn immediately, and found it above Spica, in the south-west. I built up my magnification slowly, trying to spot more detail each level I went up. Finally when I reach my 10mm EP and 2x Barlow I could clearly see the rings separate from the planet, and could see a faint dot to the top left. The right of the planet also had a faint(er) dot that was only visible when I used averted vision (so tempting to glance at it full on!). Later, I found out the first 'dot' was Titan, and the latter Dionysus, which I'm quite impressed by, I didn't think I could catch a magnitude 8.9 object in the morning sky. I took out my camera and tripod and captured some very short AVIs, only around 30s long in total because I was impatient to have my own eyes against the lens! I took one with 3x optical zoom and the other with quite a lot of digital zoom (the shame!). Sadly the planet-ring division is not distinguishable on the photos. I'm considering buying a Philips SPC880 webcam to do some imaging, would this be any better?

By 7 o'clock Saturn and the rings were still visible, but noticeably fainter against the sky. Indeed, the 'star' was no longer visible in the sky, against the twilight sky, so I packed up my stuff and went back inside, to thaw out my feet

Thanks for reading!

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice report. If you get a webcam, you will need to barlow it (4x) to get an optimal F/20.

Cheers

Michael