Telescope Reviews: Saturn & Titan...

Greetings all!

Attaches is a Saturn observation I made on the 24th May. The seeing was reasonable for a time, although it did drop off as Saturn's altitude decreased. Still it was a most interesting evening, and I observed a number of interesting things:

Drawing 1: SPR a noticeable bluish tint seemed to be present along with two reasonably defined belts. ShRG rather large now. EZ quite bright, and a EB was present. NEB a double feature although NEB(n) was darker and better defined. I was under the impression that NEB(s) contained three distinct dark sections. The northern edge of NEB(n) was most interesting and I thought Damian Peach's recent image confirmed my visual impressions well: the edge is no longer smoth and continuous, rather it has a fractured ill defined look to it, and does not pass uniformly into the bright NTropZ. NTB present but ill defined towards the planet's centre, almost as if it is being broken up in some way- it is hard to describe. NTZ quite bright and a greenish tint present here. Greenish-blue hues present in NPR.

Rings quite interesting- A-Ring light brownish colour, B1-Ring bright, B2 Ring a yellowish gray, and the C-Ring best seen in the ansae centre. Cassini Division also reasonably well seen. However, most interestingly, there appeared to be a greenish tint present on the following ansae and not on the proc. one. Whether this was real, or an atmospheric (ours) issue I am not at all certain, although i would not be at all surprised to learn that it was a seeing artifact! The effect (whatever its, cause) had gone by the time of the second drawing, and filter work carried out later showed no difference in brightness in a W80A, W25A or W11.

Drawing 2: The storm has now come onto the disk, but due to Saturn's low altitude, not a lot of fine detail was seen. I feel it still retains it's comet like appearance and is a bright white at the centre (it really stands out in W80A).

Titan: Recently I have been of the opinion that Titan has been redder than previously and as David Gray suggested the star SS-Vir as a comparison star for Titan, I looked it up (and found it quite quickly). I was stunned at just how red it was (rather coppery red), what a truly beautiful object! Titan still looked distinctly orange (though not quite as red as before), however it was clearly more orange than 34 Bootis but not as red as SS Vir.

A most interesting evening!

Best wishes,
-Paul.

Link to image

Edited by cildarith (09/28/11 08:29 PM)