Home > Ephemeris Program, Observing > Ephemeris: 01/16/2024 – Watch Saturn’s rings continue to narrow this year.

Ephemeris: 01/16/2024 – Watch Saturn’s rings continue to narrow this year.

January 16, 2024

This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, January 16th. Today the Sun will be up for 9 hours and 12 minutes, setting at 5:29, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:15. The Moon, 1 day before first quarter, will set at 12:12 tomorrow morning.

After the Moon, the next targets for the small telescope are the planets. Saturn is getting pretty low in the southwest now so there’s only about another month when it’s really visible in steady skies. Of course Saturn has those beautiful rings which are now getting very thin and by the end of March next year they will be edge on to us and then begin to open up through the rest of 2025. One’s first impression of Saturn is generally that besides the rings it’s really tiny. It averages almost a billion miles from the Earth, and even though it’s the second-largest planet it looks very tiny at that distance. Saturn’s largest moon Titan can be seen near the planet it is the second-largest moon in the solar system.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EST, UT –5 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

This is not a photograph of Saturn. It is an image produced by the program Cartes du Ciel or Sky Charts which is a free app for the PC. The rings are narrowing as Saturn approaches an equinox, which will be, for its northern hemisphere, the autumnal equinox. The rings, which orbit over Saturn’s equator, will go edge on to the Earth on March 23rd next year. The rings are about 150,000 miles in diameter however they are less than 100 feet thick so when they go edge-on to us, they will disappear, and so we will see only the thin shadow of the rings projected on the planet. Later, on May 6th, the Sun will pass through the ring plane, the actual date of the equinox, so they will not be illuminated and cast no shadow on the planet. So even though the rings open up a tiny bit for us, the rings will be dark and only appear as a black line against the planet.
Categories: Ephemeris Program, Observing Tags: