If you look towards the east late at night at the moment you'll see Leo rising with Saturn some 10° below Leo's hindquarters. Around magnitude 0.8, Saturn is nowhere near its brightest, all because the rings are presented almost edge on to us. Twice every 29.5 years Saturn's rings appear edge on to the Earth due to the inclination of Saturn's orbit relative to the Earth. On 13th January I caught my first images of Saturn this season, combining some short exposure sequences of the planet with some longer exposures to capture some of the satellites. The seeing was pretty poor and - I later discovered - my telescope was not well collimated, so I'm not too happy with the image. It'll do as a starter for ten!



If you click on the image you'll get an annotated version showing which satellites are which. Mimas and Enceladus are hidden in the eastern edge of the rings but, given the seeing and poor collimation they're not visible in this image.

When I get a better image, I'll add it to my montage of Saturn's rings over the years, shown here.