Saturn delights most stargazers, but it can be frustrating to observe, especially this year when the planet is low on the horizon for northern observers. The visual image of the planet in a telescope is often small. And if the atmosphere is not steady, the image tends to ripple and blur the delicate details in the clouds and the rings, so it's never as clear as you see in professional images taken with big scopes.

Binoculars of 10-12x will show Saturn as a tiny, slightly non-circular disk, and they show Titan as a tiny point. But that's about it. To clearly see the rings of Saturn, you will need a telescope.

Which telescope? Really, any telescope will give you a good view of the planet. Refractors of longer focal length tend to give larger high-contrast images of planets. Reflectors have a little less contrast because of the central obstruction of the secondary mirror. But if they are well collimated, reflectors do a fine job with planets. Most of the best amateur planet imagers, for example, use SCT's and Newtonians because these telescopes are available in higher apertures, and higher apertures enable higher resolution.

First, before you get started observing Saturn, make sure your telescope is aligned and cooled down to ambient temperature. If you just take it from a warm house into the cool night air, there will be eddies of air in the telescope tube and movement of the mirror surface that will badly degrade the view until the temperature of the scope equlibriates with the rest of its surroundings. It will take between 20-60 minutes for the scope to settle down, depending on the size of the mirror and lenses and so on.

Also, it helps to wait until Saturn is as high in the sky as possible before you observe. As mentioned, this year and for the next several apparitions, Saturn is south of the ecliptic and will never rise very high for northern-hemisphere observers. It is extremely well-placed for southern-hemisphere observers, however.

Don't expect a Hubble-like image. Despite its beauty, Saturn appears quite small in a telescope. The disk is only 18" across at this opposition, about 1/3 the apparent size of Jupiter at its closest and about the same size as Mars at its opposition this year. The rings extend farther, about 45-50", which makes the planet appear larger but even with the rings it's never larger than Jupiter at opposition. You can never see Saturn through a telescope quite as well as you would like to.

Once you get the planet in view, pop a low-power eyepiece in your scope. At 25x, you'll see Saturn as non-circular, and 50-60x should reveal the rings and the planet's disk.