A good 3-inch scope at 50x can show them as a separate structure detached on all sides from the ball of the planet.

The rings of Saturn should be visible in even the smallest telescope at 25x. The image pair on the right suggest how the ringed planet might look through a small telescope on a mediocre night (top) and through a larger, better telescope on a night when the air is especially still (bottom). But don't expect Hubble-like performance from viewing Saturn with your backyard telescope. However, with time, patience, and a top-quality 4-inch or larger telescope, you can tease out more of the planet's secrets than many observers suspect. Sky & Telescope illustration source: NASA / Hubble Space Telescope These images suggest how the ringed planet Saturn might will look when seen through a telescope with an aperture 4 inches (100 mm) in diameter (top) and through a larger instrument with an 8-inch aperture (bottom). Viewing Saturn is indeed a jewel, exquisite but tiny. Try to magnify it too much and it defies you by turning into a blurry mess. And the disk itself shows only about 1/6 the area of Jupiter. Saturn's ring system is 2.25 times as wide as the ball - but that's still smaller than the width of Jupiter near opposition. Viewing Saturn in a good telescope often draws gasps from visitors, who after a lifetime of seeing cartoon ringed planets are awed by viewing the original.īut you can never see Saturn as well as you want! The planet is tiny as telescopic targets go it's barely 21 arcseconds in diameter at its most favorable oppositions. In fact many say their first sight of it was what turned them on to astronomy. South is up.Īsk amateur telescope users what's the most beautiful thing in the sky, and lots of them will say Saturn. Colors and contrasts on the globe have been enhanced. Damian Peach acquired this image of Saturn on December 24, 2002, from Tenerife, Canary Islands, using an 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a SBIG ST-5c CCD camera.

Images of saturn through telescope