It can be fun and interesting to catalog and view it between its various phases. If you take the time to do that, the one thing that becomes evident is that the closer the planet gets to us, and so brighter, its crescent gets thinner and thinner, creating a spectacular sight in a magnifying eyepiece. The planet has no moons and, although it is bright and nearby, there are no features to see in its cloud cover and no surface features to glimpse through the clouds. While Venus is a sight to behold in the night sky, it is perpetually covered in the thick clouds of its atmosphere.
One such detail is the Cassini Division, which looks like a black stripe on the rings. Another detail is the outline of the planet as the rings go behind it. If you look closely, you can see different shades of yellow on the planet as well! Iapetus may be cropped out of your FOV due to its wider orbit around Saturn. Moreover, if you’re using a telescope that’s a bit heavier, it might not sit well on an elevated surface and cause vibrations that ruin the image.
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They may also go behind the planet, and sometimes you can see the satellite fade to black as it enters the shadow (or fade in from black as it leaves the shadow). In most cases a distant planet’s orbital plane is neither edge-on nor face-on when observed from Earth. Most commonly the orbital plane is tilted at some unknown angle to the line of sight.
Take Discover the best telescope for adults right here. to try out these speeds and experiment with the directional buttons on the hand controller. You only need to know where and when to look for them (it would be nice to have a calendar of astronomical events). Same as nebulae and galaxies, comets are visible as small glowing spots, but they also have tails. Big and bright comets are rare guests; such events are widely spoken about in all astronomical news, so you can hardly miss them. A star is so far away that its pinprick of light arrives in a very narrow beam, which is easily distorted as it passes through our atmosphere (we see this as twinkling). Once you get comfortable viewing Saturn – assuming you’re able to view it again and again, with a telescope of your own – you’ll begin to notice details in the rings.