Suggested Searches

1 min read

Hubble Provides Clear Images of Saturn’s Aurora

Saturn's Ultraviolet Aurora
This is the first image of Saturn's ultraviolet aurora taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope in October 1997, when Saturn was a distance of 810 million miles (1.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. The new instrument, used as a...

Here is the picture of Saturn taken by the Hubble telescope in ultraviolet light. The glowing, swirling material at Saturn's poles is its auroral "curtains," rising more than a thousand miles above the cloud tops.

Saturn's auroral displays are caused by an energetic wind from the Sun that sweeps over the planet, much like Earth's aurora, which is occasionally seen in the nighttime sky. The process that triggers these auroras is similar to the phenomenon that causes fluorescent lamps to glow.

Share

Details

Last Updated
Mar 20, 2025
Contact
Media

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

Credits

J.T. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and NASA.