How to see Saturn in 2025

It's the best time to see the ringed planet, Saturn, for 2025. Check out our BINTEL guide about how and where to see Saturn. 

Why Saturn is so bright at the moment and why that matters.

Saturn's brightness as seen from Earth varies as both it, and our home planet orbit the Sun throughout their respective years.

This month (September 2025) Saturn is at what astronomer's call opposition on the 21st.

This term simply means that the Earth and Saturn are pretty much directly opposite each other in their orbits. As we're as close are we're going to get to Saturn for the year, it's the best time to view the spectacle of the planet and its rings. (Along the same lines, if you were an alien astronomer living on the surface of a moon of Saturn, it would also be the best time to turn your telescope towards Earth!)

Planetary oppositions happen slowly. Saturn will be great viewing in the weeks leading up the 21st of September 2025 and well worth catching in the weeks and afterwards. There's no need to rush out on the night or worry you might miss it.

An illustration showing how the Sun, the Earth and Saturn line up during an opposition. It's not to scale, but rather to give you an idea of their positions. Image by Jess Gilmore, BINTEL 

During opposition, Saturn will appear as a brilliant, slightly yellowish "star". It will be one of the brightest stars in the sky, slightly fainter than Betelgeuse, the red star that forms one of the shoulders of the famous constellation Orion.

Where can I spot Saturn?

Around the time of opposition, Saturn will rise close to sunset and be visible most of the night. For best viewing, I would give it two or three hours after it gets darks for it to get a bit higher in the sky. You can use the chart below to get an idea where it be located around this time. It will appear as a bright yellowish star.

Where to find Saturn at around 9.30pm on the 21st of September 2025. The view is from Sydney. Saturn will appear close to the rising Moon and be visible throughout the night. 

Over the next couple of months, Saturn will rise later and later in the evening. 

If you don't have a telescope like one of the Celestron StarSense Explorer range that have night sky navigation as standard, then there's a wide range of apps to help you find planets and deep-sky objects. One of our favourites is Stellarium that can run on your phone, tablet or PC.

Almost any telescope will show the rings of Saturn

The rings of Saturn are the most famous single feature in the Solar System*

One of the most amazing sights in astronomy is to point your telescope at what looks like a bright star with your eyes and then spot a small ball with rings around it in the eyepiece! I remember it doing exactly that as a youngster and it was one of the things that got me hooked on space and astronomy for the rest of my life.

BINTEL sells a wide range of telescopes that will deliver great views of Saturn and what's more, you don't have to spend a lot of money either. For example, this Celestron StarSense Explorer LT127 AZ is great for viewing Saturn as well as Jupiter, Mars, the Moon and thousands of deep-sky objects. 

The varying angles of Saturn's Rings

Saturn, like the Earth, orbits the Sun at slight tilt. This tilt is the reason we have seasons and Saturn too has seasons.  It also means that during some oppositions Saturn's rings, which are aligned around the middle of the planet, are wide open and facing Earth. This is when they're at their most spectacular.  As the seasons on Saturn change and the angle of its tilt changes, how the rings appear to us here on planet Earth will change too. 

The varying view of Saturn as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)

Saturn's rings in 2025 are fairly edge on, more like the bottom left corner of the HST image and will open up more in the coming years. This is a good time to try to spot the faint bands on the surface of Saturn. 

(Your views won't be a sharp or detailed as the those in this image as you won't be looking through a multi-billion dollar space telescope like Hubble. You might still be surprised at you can see! through your home telescope!)

Why doesn't Saturn twinkle as much as Milky Way stars?

One thing that's noticeable about the Solar System planets is that while they appear as "stars" in the night sky, they also lack one feature you'll see when viewing Milky Way stars of similar brightness: planets don't twinkle anywhere near as much as the stars do. 

Stars twinkle as due to the disturbances in the air above our heads and this varies night to night. Even the smallest star is vast compared to the size of a planet. As all visible stars range in distance from a handful to possibly even thousands of light years away, light even from these massive disks arrives on here on Earth as a single point of light.**

Astronomers call the quality of the air the seeing. It's not always dependant on the weather. Sometimes clear skies can have very poor seeing and you can often get sharp views when patchy clouds are overhead. 

We can see the disk of major planets with even a small telescope. The light from the planets spread over a slightly larger region and as they're not pinpoints, are less impacted by wiggles and fluctuations in the air. 

Have we visited Saturn?

Yes! Several spacecraft have visited Saturn, although not as many as you might think. Only four spacecraft have been there. Three were just flybys, with one sophisticated mission spending years observing the ringed planet and its moons from complex orbits.  

Humanity got its first close up of Saturn in 1979 with a flyby of Pioneer 11.  The famous Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes made flybys as part of their "Grand Tour" of the Solar System that also included exploring beyond Saturn with visits to Uranus and Neptune. 

In 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft which was a joint NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) project, arrived at Saturn where it spent the next 13 years imaging and observing Saturn and its moons. It finished with the Cassini probe deliberately crashing into Saturn itself to avoid any contamination of Saturn's moon with microbial life from Earth. 

What's next for exploring Saturn?

For such an amazing place, human beings aren't expending a lot of effort in making firm plans to return to Saturn***. The only confirmed mission is the car sized Dragonfly due to launch sometime in July 2028 and arrive at Saturn's moon Titan, in 2034. You can read more about NASA's Dragonfly mission here. 

Until then, we'll need to observe Saturn from Earth or with space telescopes. 

Next week: A telescope and some camera options for taking photos of Saturn, Jupiter, the Moon and more. 

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL

13th of September 2025

PS: Here's a few further bits of info you might find useful:

* Other planets in the Solar System have rings as well Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have rings systems; however, Saturn is the only rings you'll be able to see with your telescope

** But I can see a small "disk" when looking at some stars? Is this the surface of the star? No. Humans have only seen the surface of a small number of stars using extremely large telescopes. What you are seeing is the single point of light spread over a small area by wobbles in the atmosphere, a view that's not totally focussed or some kind of aberration caused by your telescope's optics. Or maybe a combination of all of the above. 

*** The discovery of possible signs of past life called biomarkers in the Solar System such as on Mars would without doubt make Saturn a high priority for future missions. Its moon, Titan, is the only other place in the Solar System apart from Earth that has water on its surface and a thick atmosphere. Another moon, Enceladus, possibly has an ocean under its icy sheets that cover the surface. NASA’s Cassini probe flew through geysers near its south pole and found chemicals including organic compounds which might help life form.