Saturn (Bruce Rohrlach)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Saturn

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Saturn

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

With Saturn reaching opposition on the 1-2 August, it's closest approach to earth when it reaches its zenith at local mid-night, August is a great month to photograph the planet Saturn.

Should a moon in orbit, or an asteroid or comet stray closer to a planet than its Roche limit (which is around 2.5 times a planets radius from its centre), gravitational tidal forces will tear the body apart. Luckily for us, our moon orbits around 380,000 km from the earth, well beyond the earth's Roche limit of around 10,000 above the earth's surface.

Saturn's Roche limit is 87,000 km above its cloud tops, and intrigueingly matches the location of Saturn's outermost F ring. Most of Saturns major intact moons orbit beyond its Roche limit. Anything that strays inside the Roche limit ends up being torn apart by Saturns immense gravitational tidal forces, which overcomes the gravitational attraction that holds Moons, comets and asteroids together.

Saturn's rings are thought to be pieces of comets, asteroids, or shattered moons that broke up before they reached the planet, torn apart by Saturn's powerful gravity. There are several theories for the origin of the rings, the earliest was put forward by Edouard Roche, who postulated an inner moon called Veritas that underwent orbital decay and was torn apart and disintegrated by these tidal forces as it passed the Roche limit of Saturn, the debri now following the original orbital plane of the moon.

Actually all 4 of the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus) have their ring systems inside their respective Roche limits, Saturns rings are just the most spectacular of the four.

Skywatcher 8 inch/f5 Newtonian.
14-08-2021 Lysterfield, Victoria.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
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Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
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Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

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