Saturn's northern hemisphere basking in Light
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| Detail of Hexagon: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute |
The north pole of Saturn is approaching summer solstice of the ring planet which will be in May 2017, now sunlight is bathing the north pole of the planet as it is seen in this new image by the Cassini spacecraft taken with the spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2016 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.
Like it happens on Earth, Saturn’s axis is tilted relative to the Sun’s equator, 27-degrees on Saturn, compared to the 23-degrees for Earth. But season on Saturn last way longer since Saturn takes 30 years to orbit the Sun.
A feature fully illuminated here is the hexagon-shaped jet-stream, on this picture 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.
The view is looking in the direction of the sunlit side of the rings from about 51 degrees above the ring plane, and it was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers from Saturn. Image scale is 74 kilometers per pixel.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, Wikipedia
