Pretty picture: Saturn storm

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2011/03/08 10:46 CST

Topics: pretty pictures, amateur image processing, Saturn, Cassini

To relieve this week's text-heavy LPSC posts, here's a brief one on an incredible panorama across Saturn's northern storm, taken on February 26 by Cassini and assembled by unmannedspaceflight.com member "Astro0." Click to enlarge to see the mesmerizing detail of whirling storms, as intricate as anything you'd find on Jupiter.

NASA / JPL / SSI / mosaic by Astro0

Storm panorama

In early 2011 Cassini took several high-resolution panoramas along the enormous storm that had developed in Saturn's northern hemisphere. This view was captured in an infrared wavelength in which Saturn's atmospheric methane is relatively transparent, yielding tremendous detail of the whorls making up Saturn's weather.

Here's a wide-angle view for context, taken a day earlier, so the details of the storm are not quite the same:

NASA / JPL / SSI / color composite by Ian Regan

Stormy Saturn

Cassini captured this approximately true-color view of Saturn with its enormous storm on February 25, 2011. The northern storm is obvious, but if you look below it you'll see a subtler band of whirling clouds.