Saturn's Northern Hemisphere Storm

Saturn's northern storm marches through the planet's atmosphere in the top right of this false-color mosaic from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

See PIA14905 to learn more about this storm and watch its development over several months. Earlier in the Cassini mission, the spacecraft chronicled a smaller storm in the southern hemisphere, called the "Dragon Storm." See PIA06197 to learn more about that storm and to see a similar, false-color view.

Saturn's atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false-color composite made from 12 images taken in near-infrared light through filters that are sensitive to varying degrees of methane absorption. Red and orange colors in this view indicate clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Yellow and green colors, most noticeable along the top edge of the view, indicate intermediate clouds. White and blue indicate high clouds and haze. The rings appear as a thin horizontal line of bright blue because they are outside of the atmosphere and not affected by methane absorption.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ring plane.

The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The images filtered at 890 nanometers are projected as blue. The images filtered at 728 nanometers are projected as green, and images filtered at 752 nanometers are projected as red.

The images were taken on January 11, 2011, over about 50 minutes, at a distance of approximately 569,000 miles (915,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. The images were re-projected to the same viewing geometry, so that scale in this final mosaic is 63 miles (102 kilometers) per pixel.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Note: For other photos in this series, see PIA12828: Storm Head in False Color, PIA12829: Storm Tail in False Color, PIA14901: Eleven Hours Later, PIA14902: Birth of a Behemoth Storm, PIA14903: Encircling a Giant, PIA14904: Nearly True Color Storm Close-Up, PIA14905: Chronicling Saturn's Northern Storm, PIA14906: Churning Psychedelia, and PIA14907: Kaleidoscopic Rainbows.