Crab-less Saturn last night

by Jane Houston Jones

We took a look at Saturn last night (in between watching several episodes of "Taken" on a night we thought would be clouded out). An email check between alien abductions yielded some Shallow Sky list posts which made us turn off TIVO and turn on Stardust, my 10-inch f/7.3 homemade dobsonian reflector. Well, Stardust is an alt/az reflector, so it doesn't need any turning on, really. We just carried it out to the front deck. :-)

To our eyes, the glow around Saturn was just the usual amount of light scattering within the reflector optics (mirror, dust, eyepieces), but like everyone else, the glow looked a little moreso on the south side of the planet. I do not think it was M1, just the usual view through a reflector. The view did improve when we moved from 21 Vixen Lanthanum to the 25 and 16 Zeiss Abbe Orthos, tho, less "glow" around Saturn.