Saturn's Rings Nearly Edge On

Saturn is finally up at a reasonable hour, though it's not very high in the sky. Seeing wasn't great and Saturn was only 43 degrees in the sky, which is pretty low for photographs, but Saturn is too pretty to pass up.

I used my 10” dobsonian with a 3x Barlow lens and my ZWO ASI290MC camera. I used a 15ms shutter speed and took about 2000 frames, tying to hand track as delicately as possible to not cause vibrations and blurring.

The frames were stacked in autostakkert, sharpened with wavelet filters in Registax, and then touched up in Google photos.

The details isn't great, that's mostly due to the bad seeing and the low elevation angle, but that knife edge ring is just barely visible!

Saturn’s rings visibility changes throughout its orbit when viewed from the Earth, and we just recently passed through the most edge-on orientation. Only a few years ago we saw the rings tipped fully down, showing them off in their full glory.