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Hi George, You are right in that Saturn would look the same size in a 6 or a 24 at the same mag, but you would get a brighter image in the 24 due
to it's greater light gathering power, and you would see more detail, but not because of it's light gathering ability, but because the smallest
feature that can be resolved is a function of primary objective
mirror/lens diameter. Moon craters illustrate this well. The smallest
crater resolvable with a given size scope ia as follows.
4"[100mm] 3.5km diam. 8"[200mm] 1.8km diam. 12"[300mm] 1.2km.
Moon rilles minimum width 4" 250 metres 8" 110 metres 12" 70 metres.
Due to the aforementioned light gathering power of the 24, a huge
number of faint objects would be totally invisible in the 6, but readily
visible in the 24. A good illustration of light gathering is the number of stars visible in different size scopes. If you could see the whole sky at
one time, a 4" would show you approx. 3 million stars, 8" 12 million,
and a 12" 30 million.
raymo
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