WHy doesnt my view of Saturn look like the picture

I've gotta be doing something wrong. I swear I am.
With my trusty 8" SCT, I lookup in the heavens, find Saturn and see almost no color. It looks almost all white to me with white rings around it.

I have a parks 15mm eyepiece that brings it in clear. Are these pictures taken with a special filter? So far, the only color I have seen is blue, and that was in the Orion Nebula.
Help! What am I doing wrong? Why cant I see color?

Ben,

It is a combination of your eyes and your expectations.

The color that you see in the photos is from long exposures (or tons of short ones). Your eyes can only see a single short exposure. The color doesn't have time to soak in. You will see very little color compared to photos.
The excitement is seeing it live, real time. That is, for some, far better then any photo. Of course as you treat your eventual aperture fever, you will see more color (never as much as some of the beautiful photos posted her on AM).

Ed

Actually, I think part of your problem is too little magnification. Saturn's colors are subtle, and will get washed out if the image is too bright. With a 15mm eyepiece, I think you're getting around 133x with your 8 inch scope. That's not pushing an 8inch scope too much, and the image brightness will be quite high. I think if you get your magnification up to about 200x, colors will be easier to see - but the image probably won't be as sharp and clear.

With my 6inch scope at 171x, Saturn looks pale golden with tan banding, and the two main divisions of the ring seem to be different shades. These colors are subtle, but not hard to see. (...but never as colorful as the more colorful images you'll see posted around here).

On the other hand, I seem to see pale color better than some people, but if the Orion nebula has that blue/green look to you instead of just grey, then you probably have pretty good color sensitivity.

My first view of Saturn was in 1980 when the rings were edge-on. It looked like a white dot with a line through it.

Some eye training is in order here, which comes mainly from time logged at the eyepiece. Much of this disappointment is due to the fact that your eyes are looking at something that they are used to recognizing as fairly featureless (a bright, white dot).

Your eyes and brain have to 'get used' to seeing detail in a little bright white dot. It's not something they're used to doing, or even trying to do. Your brain is an image enhancement computer and it takes time to learn the proper filtering for this kind of image. I know it sounds strange, but this actually takes practice more than anything.

Observe regularly and give it a few months. The colors and detail will come.

Sometimes I wish I were a tetrachromat. But then I would have to deal with the whole pregnancy thing ( women can only be tetrachromats)..

aahh..

So then the Horsehead Nebulae is red in pictures, should I expect it to be grey in my eyepiece? I have a LPF, will that help to bring out reds? It seems to enhance blues very well...

Hello Ben,

I like the suggestions concerning using a little higher magnification and just plain practice.

You might also want to do some mooching off of other people's scopes to compare what they see with what you see at the same eyepiece. An experienced observer can sometimes point out subtle details to look for that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Hello:
I don't think you're doig anything wrong. Generally it's hard to see much color in the sky. Color films and color CCD images have different sensitivities to colors than our eyes. Also, it is very common for the color saturation to be enhanced in photos to make the photos more appealing. A good example are the Voyager images of Jupiter. Anyone who has looked through a scope at Jupiter knows it doesn't have bright red bands and spots, but that's the way they processed the image for visial impact. Cassini released a very nice image of Jupiter that they processed to reflect the colors as seen by the human eye, and it is very interesting to compare the two images. Asside from this, the eye loses some of it's color sensing ability when it is looking at something very bright, such as a planet. For example, people often commentt hat Mars doesn't look that red. Part of that is because, espectially in a large scope, it's so bright. So I don't think you're doing anything wrong. For the record, in my scope (a 12.5" cassegrain) I see the ball of Saturn as an yellow-ish off-white with light tan bands, a white B ring, and a slightly grayish A ring. The colors and shades are subtle, and higher powers may help by reducing the brightness of the planet and rings.

Cheers
Mike Connelley