The whole Saturn‘s northern region is bathed in sunlight in this view from late 2016. The hexagon-shaped jet-stream is fully illuminated here.
In this image, the planet appears darker in regions where the cloud deck is lower, such the region interior to the hexagon. Mission experts on Saturn’s atmosphere are taking advantage of the season and Cassini’s favorable viewing geometry to study this and other weather patterns as Saturn’s northern hemisphere approaches Summer solstice.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 51 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2016 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 46 miles (74 kilometers) per pixel.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
source NASA
Leave A Comment