As we close out 2025, Saturn offered one last moment of subtle drama before it passes Eastern quadrature on its way to a springtime Solar conjunction. On the evening of November 22nd, Towson enjoyed a brief window of clear skies – just enough for me to take in a rare combination of events: a Titan transit that was already in progress as dusk fell, and Saturn’s rings appearing as thin as we would see them all year (in fact, as thin as we’ll see them for the next 15 years!). The true ring-plane crossing back in the spring was lost to solar conjunction, so this November evening became the next closest recreation of the event.
Visual Attempt with the 6-inch RV‑6
My goal was simple but ambitious: could I visually detect Titan’s silhouette against Saturn’s disk during the transit? I began the session with my trusty 6" RV‑6 reflector on the HEM27 mount. Unfortunately, the mount was having a rough go of it. About every ten seconds or so it would stutter, just enough to be annoying but not enough to prevent visual work.
I tried a few eyepiece combinations and filters in search of the “sweet spot” for the observation. I began with the excellent 8mm TMB eyepiece with a light green filter, but the image seemed a tad small at 150x. I then swapped that out for the Celestron Ultima Edge 15mm with the 2.5× TeleVue Barlow, yielding a still crisp view at 200x.
The seeing would occasionally steady for a few brief moments as the planet drifted silently by with the tracking turned off, floating through the field as if using a Dob. The ring shadow was unmistakable and striking as a crisp, dark line slicing across the globe. With the rings nearly edge-on, they looked like a taut thread stretched across the planet. Subtle dusky shading flanked the ring plane in both hemispheres, though neither side stood out more strongly.
But Titan itself? After twenty minutes of careful, unstrained observing with me perched on a stool peering into the eyepiece, I had to concede defeat. Whether it was the limits of the 6-inch aperture, the low contrast of the event, or simply my older eyes, the moon’s silhouette never definitively popped into view.
Imaging Session
After wrapping up the visual attempt, I moved to the front driveway where the Cyrus 10" Newtonian had been cooling. By 8 p.m. I was capturing data through the Baader 685 nm deep red filter. The seeing was average at best, perhaps even slipping below that as the night went on, and transparency hovered around 6–7/10 with a haze creeping in by a little after 9 p.m.
Even so, Saturn was rewarding. The rings were astonishingly thin on the live feed displayed on the laptop, and both the north and south equatorial belts were faintly visible. At 8:21 p.m. I noticed Titan as a small dot hugging the planet’s limb, promising an interesting capture from the night’s effort. I also played with the settings a bit, increasing the gain and exposure to brighten the disk and improve the odds of recording Titan and maybe another of the smaller moons. Conditions continued to deteriorate as we headed towards 9 o’clock, and with haze thickening I decided not to stay out to try to include a Jupiter run in the evening’s efforts.
Final Images
The processed results from the 10-inch show Saturn in its late‑2025 austerity: a nearly ringless world with a bold shadow line and muted atmospheric bands that are far better defined using the deep red filter. The WL (white light) image required some work to bring out any coloration. The composed final image which blends the color shot with the IR as the luminance channel serves as a satisfying souvenir of the 2025 near ring crossing event.
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