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*~*~ THE LORD OF THE RINGS ~*~*
Here is an animation I compiled from data captured on or about the date of Saturn's opposition to Earth over the past four years. Three different telescopes and focal ratios were used for the captures. So, the animation is a little stretched and noisy, but I think it illustrates how our view of the ring tilt changes as we move along the 'inside track' and our perspective of this distant gas giant's ring plane changes with time.
An image of Saturn from January 15th, 2005. This image shows the planet one day after the historic landing of the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. I used the Philips ToUcam Pro web cam and a Televue 2x Powermate for this image along with the 14.5" Starmaster atop a Johnsonian Type V equatorial platform. Data was acquired using K3CCD Tools and processed with Registax 3 and Photoshop. This is a stacked set of 68 handpicked frames out of 802 total. When compared to the images below, one can make out that the tilt of the rings has closed noticeably in the past year. The attitude of the ring system will continue to cycle towards an edge-on view in 2009. Then they will tilt to show the north pole of Saturn with the rings fully open again in 2016.
On January 18th 2004 at about 10:45 PM, I imaged Saturn with my webcam; a Philips ToUcam Pro. I shot several loops of .avi video each about 700MB-1GB in length. After capturing this data with K3CCD Tools, I ran it through Registax 2 to grade, re-order and stack the best frames in each video file. Final processing was performed in Photoshop. The image on the left was lightly sharpened...in the center the same image overexposed to enhance the thin diaphanous inner ring commonly referred to as the crepe ring...on the right from a different file, more aggressive sharpening was done to show the banding on the planet's surface. The webcam was set-up to shoot through a 2x Televue Barlow on my 14.5" StarMaster Newtonian reflector riding atop my Johnsonian Type V equatorial platform. Tres Placitas Observatory, Santa Fe, NM
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peter@astronomyadventures.com
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