Saturn
Probably the most interesting planet to look at through any reasonable telescope is the planet Saturn. I recall my first views through a 40mm refractor as a young man. Even at the awesome power of 50X, the rings were spectacular. The first time anyone sees Saturn through a telescope, they can not help to be awestruck. Saturn takes many years to complete one orbit. No wonder he is considered father time. It usually takes a major part of one lifetime just to see it complete one orbit. When I first recognized Saturn back in the early 1970s it was in the constellation of Taurus. Saturn has since passed through the entire Zodiac and then some. I have seen the rings edge-on three times in my astronomical life. This mosaic of images I have taken over the past two decades with my webcam/planetary camera shows how the rings shift each year. Between 2011 and 2024, I was not imaging Saturn often because of the low declination and poor seeing conditions.
While Saturn's rings are what catches people's eyes, there are other events that show up from time to time. In 1994, a storm erupted on Saturn producing a display that was imaged by the HST. It happened again in 2010-2011. I took this image on January 6, 2011. Is it possible the next appearance will be between 2026-2030?
In 2025, the Earth crossed the ring plane of Saturn. This resulted in transits of the moons of Saturn. While I had missed the earlier ones, Titan had three transits that included the shadow of the moon in the fall of 2025 that I was able to image. They were on September 4th, September 20th and October 6th. The seeing was acceptable for all three events but it varied and some images are better than others. Titan appears as a fainter and less distinct object compared to the shadow. In the case of the September 4 event, it did not cross the planet but the shadow did. The Event on the 27th had Titan very close to the shadow. At first I thought it was a defect/vibration of some kind but I discovered that Titan was just to the lower left of the shadow during the transit and it appeared in all of the images. Conditions were not that good for this transit so I had only one acceptable image. The October 6th event had the shadow barely clip the pole of the planet and it is barely visible in the image, while Titan made a transit across the face of the planet.
