Saturn’s Rings will disappear from sight in March of 2025, but only for a few months.
During Saturn’s 29.5 year orbit around our Sun, the planet Saturn presents a ring plane crossing every 14-15 years as seen from Earth.
In reality, it all has to do with planetary alignments.
As Saturn and Earth orbit the Sun, the two planets align in such way that gives us these wonderful views of
Saturn’s majestic rings and the tilting/ring plane cycle.
This is what I really like about Saturn, that every year I can look and see the rings tilted at a slightly different angle than the previous year, but when it goes edge on and vanishes, it looks really strange!!…as we are so accustomed to seeing the ring system around the planet.
Saturn’s rings are so thin (30ft up to 2 miles thick in some places) when viewed from Earth, that they seemingly vanish when viewed edge-on, due to our distance from Saturn.
The distance of Saturn from Earth is currently 1.3 billion kilometers (~ 812.5 million miles), the reflected light takes 1 hours, 12 minutes and 41.6580 seconds to travel from Saturn and arrive to us on Earth.
Now you may still see the ring’s shadow cast upon the planet’s disk, but the rings will become invisible to your eyes or cameras when looking or shooting through the telescope come March of 2025.
Capture details:
C-11 SCT telescope, ADC, 2x Barlow, QHY462C Cmos Camera,
Fire-Capture Software, SER file, 60FPS, 17 ms exposures, stacked 50% of 5,000 frames.
Astrosurface, Registax6, and Adobe Raw CC.
High haze and poor seeing, but I managed to pull this image out of the muck.
Captured from my backyard observatory in Dayton, Ohio on 08-15-2024 at 05:59 UT
Best Regards,
John Chumack
www.galacticimages.com
