Saturn's Northern Hexagon
Why would clouds form a hexagon on Saturn? Nobody is sure. Originally discovered during the Voyager flybys of Saturn in the 1980s, nobody has ever seen anything like it anywhere else in the Solar System . Acquiring its first sunlit views of far northern Saturn in late 2012 , the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera recorded this stunning, false-color image of the ringed planet's north pole. The composite of near-infrared image data results in red hues for low clouds and green for high ones, giving the Saturnian cloudscape a vivid appearance. This and similar images show the stability of the hexagon even 20+ years after Voyager. Movies of Saturn's North Pole show the cloud structure maintaining its hexagonal structure while rotating. Unlike individual clouds appearing like a hexagon on Earth , the Saturn cloud pattern appears to have six well defined sides of nearly equal length. Four Earth s could fit inside the hexagon . Beyond the cloud tops at the upper right, arcs of the planet's eye-catching rings are tinted bright blue.