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Cassini Gets Amazing Views of Saturn's Hexagon

SternisheFan sends this excerpt from a JPL news release: "NASA's Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn's north pole. This is the first hexagon movie of its kind (GIF), using color filters, and the first to show a complete view of the top of Saturn down to about 70 degrees latitude. Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds (about 322 kilometers per hour) with a massive, rotating storm at the center. There is no weather feature exactly, consistently like this anywhere else in the solar system. 'The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable,' said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. 'A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries.'"

4 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Let me be among the first... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Funny

    I have no clue what I'm looking at.

    The Saturnian Department of Defense? The funny thing is, it looks like it's full of staaaaaaa... [carrier lost]

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  2. Re:Compass by alexander_686 · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, it’s just that God prefers Allen wrenches.

  3. I know something better by stevegee58 · · Score: 3, Funny

    The Hexagon of Saturn is nothing compared with the Delta of Venus
    I want some pics of that.

  4. Re:Let me be among the first... by VortexCortex · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...to say the .gif is mesmerizing, and I have no clue what I'm looking at.

    If you later said, "Lol, that's a false color prostate exam camera," I wouldn't be shocked.

    Really? I'd be shocked. This is Saturn not Uranus.