Last night, I captured the first photo I’ve ever taken of Saturn.
I’m the first to admit that this isn’t a spectacular or even good photo by any stretch of the imagination. I can find lots to criticize about it. However, I was surprised that a modest camera with a 300mm zoom lens was able to show the rings and planet so distinctly.
This is probably as good as or better than the view Galileo had of Saturn when he discovered its rings with his primitive telescope in July 1610. He couldn’t even see them as rings with his telescope. He thought they were smaller planets on either side of the the main body of Saturn.
And I should count myself fortunate that my photo turned out as well as it did in the first place. The ten images I took afterward were all blurred by atmospheric turbulence, since Saturn was pretty low in the southeast sky when I shot the photos.
Saturn is nearing opposition, which means that the Earth is between it and the Sun. It’s the closest we will get to Saturn for another 13 months or so. It also means that this is about as big as Saturn will appear in my camera, unless I get a telescope.
So if we could get closer to Saturn, and look back toward the Sun with Saturn blocking the Sun’s light, what would we see? This:
I don’t even know how to start talking about this mosaic of images taken from the Cassini spacecraft earlier this year. Here we’re looking at Saturn’s night side, with reflected light from the rings lighting up part of the planet. We’re also looking at the backlit side of the rings. The backlighting makes the denser parts of the rings—which normally appear brighter to us on Earth—look darker, because less sunlight is getting through.
For what it’s worth, I also got a shot of Jupiter and three of its moons last night. To the left of Jupiter is Ganymede. To its right are Europa and Callisto. (They’re dim compared to the bright glare of Jupiter, but trust me, they’re there.)
And here’s a recent photo of Jupiter’s south pole from the Juno orbiter.
What a wonderful age to live in, where we can take photos of planets with our own personal cameras, and also see nearly-live views of those same planets from orbit just above them.