The Disappearance of Saturn's Rings

A composite of some of my images of Saturn taken over the last 6 years showing how the angle of Saturn's rings to Earth have been slowly decreasing.
A little later this year (March), the angle will have decreased to the point where the rings will be edge-on towards Earth and, given the thickness of the rings being as little as 30 feet, only larger telescopes will be able to see them as a thin line bisecting the planet.
Saturn's ring angle towards Earth cycles over a 13 to 15 year period going from nearly fully open to edge on then back again. By 2026, the rings will be visible again, looking much as they did in 2024.

Meade 12" LX850 telescope, Skyris 236M video camera, RGB filter wheel, firecapture software on a 17" laptop.

Each image in the composite comes from three video sequences, one through a red filter, one through a green and one through a blue filter. These sequences are cropped in specialized software (Pipp), aligned in Autostakkert3 and the best 30% are stacked to produce a single .png format image per video sequence. I take each of these images, (red, green and blue filtered images) into Registax for wavelets processing to sharpen and optimize for best detail. These three images are taken into photoshop for integration into a single color (rgb) image.