Saturn - North Polar Region

The north polar region of Saturn is pictured in great detail in this Voyager 2 image obtained Aug. 25 from a range of 633,000 kilometers (393,000 miles). Two oval cloud systems some 250 km. (150 mi.) across are visible at about 72 degrees north latitude. The bright spot in the center of the leftmost cloud is a convective cloud storm about 60 km. (37 mi.) across. The outer ring of material rotates in an anti-cyclonic sense (counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere). A similar cloud structure of comparable dimension appears at 55 degrees north (bottom center of this picture). These northern latitudes contain many bright, small-scale cloud spots--only a few tens of kilometers across--representative of convective cloud systems. Across the top of this image stretch several long, linear, wavelike features that may mark the northernmost east-flowing jet in Saturn's atmosphere. In this orange-and-violet-image composite, the smallest features visible are about 16 km. (10 mi.) across. The Voyager project is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.