Astroblog: Saturn as you have never seen it.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Saturn as you have never seen it.

Image Credit NASA/JPL (click to enlarge)

This stunning image is from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. The bright patches are actually cloud clearings, glowing with heat from deep within Saturn. There are a number of interesting features, such as the dark "donuts", but the outstanding feature is the "String of Pearls". The regular line of alternating dark and light features. This line of clearings stretches over 60,000 kilometers, which is pretty amazing. Exactly how this regular feature is produced is not certain, but it is long lasting, having beeen around for several months. See the NASA site for more details and a higher resolution image, or this New Scientist news article.

Not boggled enough? Head over to the Bad Astronomer NOW for the Best.Saturn.Picture.EVAH!

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# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 9:41 pm

Comments:

Cool find. It doesn't look like the planet gets appreciably colder toward the pole.

# posted by

Anonymous : 6:52 am

As most of the heat in Saturn is generated by porcesses similar to that in Jupiter (helium rain-out is the major one I believe) there should be a more or less unifrom distribution of heat. Solar heating plays a minimual role down bel0w

# posted by