Wesley's Tool-Box

The superzoom SX50 HS was looking out the window again to shoot Saturn. This time, my three-year old daughter wanted in on the action, so she looked at the viewfinder and took a few shots with my help. She was amazed at how a tiny star in the sky is actually that planet with rings she saw in a book.

The setup was identical to the previous post yesterday except that the shutter speed was slowed down to 1/10s. This made for brighter photos. You can see a hint of Saturn's own shadow on the rings just behind the left side of the planet.

UPDATE: The photos I took tonight shows the shadow that Saturn is casting upon its rings much clearer.

I'm getting better results thanks to finding a more stable tripod configuration, leading to sharper images and less frames thrown away due to blurring.

This seems to be about as good as this camera gets, unless some more optical equipment is thrown in. Cassini division on the rings would not be visible unless much more significantly advanced optics come into play.

UPDATE 2015-04-12: Nearly two years later, I now have that "more optical equipment" and for the first time, I was able to resolve the Cassini Division.

These are untouched photographs of Saturn taken by my new Canon SX50 HS digital camera on a tripod without any additional equipment. The 50x optical zoom seemed to be just at the edge of producing some interesting photographs of the planets, which was the motivation for the camera's purchase. Saturn was the first candidate to test this out. One, it is up in the night sky for several hours these days, unlike the other planets which go down the horizon after early evening. Two, its rings made it easy to identify.