Saturn

It's not like I haven't tried to take a picture of Saturn in the night sky before. But the problem was, you see, this planet is so far away that it is just a small dim point of light. Still can be seen on a clear night but very difficult to photograph. If I were to set the shutter speed too slow, all I would get is a short streaky line. And if the shutter speed was a wee bit faster, then I won't see any point of light that's reasonably bright enough.

But tonight at about 8.40pm, I was outdoors to take a picture of Jupiter and I saw Saturn hovering above the bigger planet. Both planets could be captured inside a single frame, and I took many shots to be on the safe side to eliminate any camera shake. There was this one picture that could possibly be the best from the batch taken. Jupiter was round, which means that there was very minimal camera shake at this very instance. So theoretically, Saturn in the same frame as Jupiter would turn out reasonably well too.

I know that it is still blur, especially with the prevailing cloudy weather condition and I had to crop and enlarge the picture, but this was how my standard telephoto zoom lens picked out Saturn in the night sky tonight. The resolution is so-so only. No doubt, people with better quality lens should be able to get a clearer picture of the rings around the planet. (The picture on the right, showing a clearly defined Saturn, is not mine. It came from an Instagram post.)

I should add that as we get nearer to 21 December, the apparent positions of the two planets will be edging even closer together. It seems that the last time it happened was some 800 years ago. Maybe it also happened some 2,000 years ago too. Who knows?