I was out looking at Saturn on the same night through binoculars, and after quite a lot of digital reproduction, I believe the image below is very close to what I saw. The point to doing this is to try and show the relative difference between images, from a baseline viewpoint. True my memory can never truly be used but in a graphical sense the two images side by side show a marked difference (as you would expect). I hope you don't mind me borrowing your image for this demonstration.
When I was last capturing Saturn, I was sketching in the red light, from a Yasco 5-inch reflector on the roof of my parent's place in Beaumaris (outside of Melbourne) in 1976 at age 15.
As an aside, with the trusty paper and pencil, over a period of many days, I managed to produced quite an impressive stop motion animation of Saturn's moons as they orbited their mother planet. Aint it funny though, I gravitated to film-making and not astronomy. My mistake.
I was out looking at Saturn on the same night through binoculars, and after quite a lot of digital reproduction, I believe the image below is very close to what I saw. The point to doing this is to try and show the relative difference between images, from a baseline viewpoint. True my memory can never truly be used but in a graphical sense the two images side by side show a marked difference (as you would expect). I hope you don't mind me borrowing your image for this demonstration.
Ron, a yellow "star" with "ears"! That's what I first saw. I'm now more clearly seeing the rings separated from the planet. The other night, a couple of experienced guys looking through my 30x100s said the rings are clearly seen. I think, as we move on in our orbit, Saturn's shadow starts to fall across the rings on one side and that will aid our ability to resolve the rings at 20x and 30x. Sometime in last May, observing around 7-8pm should be the maximum shadow, I believe.
Ron, a yellow "star" with "ears"! That's what I first saw. I'm now more clearly seeing the rings separated from the planet. The other night, a couple of experienced guys looking through my 30x100s said the rings are clearly seen. I think, as we move on in our orbit, Saturn's shadow starts to fall across the rings on one side and that will aid our ability to resolve the rings at 20x and 30x. Sometime in last May, observing around 7-8pm should be the maximum shadow, I believe.
That's good news, because looking at Saturn is just so much fun, if as you say it gets better, I can't wait. Tell me honestly, the rough image I provided below, is this how you see it, or have seen it, given some leeway for my shaky drawing?
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