Saturn with the rings nearly edge-on
Saturn's rings are tilting towards edge-on over the next couple of years, and this autumn they are thin enough that the planet looks like a bead on a wire. It is the least photogenic Saturn gets and, I think, the most interesting. The usual postcard version hides the fact that you are looking at a disc of ice a few hundred metres thick and two hundred thousand kilometres across.
I tried photographing it and gave up. Stacking frames from a phone held against an eyepiece produces something that is technically a picture of Saturn and conveys nothing. So I drew it instead: a circle for the disc, a straight line for the rings, soft pencil, a lot of rubbing with a fingertip.
Drawing forces you to look for twenty minutes instead of two. Things appear in that time. The belt across the northern hemisphere, which I had never noticed, became obvious once I had to decide where to put it. The shadow of the rings on the disc was there as a thin dark line. Titan was easy, and after a while there were two more faint dots that I marked without knowing what they were. Checking later: Rhea and Dione, roughly where they should have been.
None of that was invisible before. I just had not been looking long enough to see it.
The sketch itself is not good. That turns out not to be the point. A notebook of mediocre drawings is a far better record of a year of observing than a folder of mediocre photographs, because each drawing is a record of attention rather than of equipment.