Stormy North

The weather forecast for Saturn's north pole: storms. Lots and lots of storms. Here, the area within Saturn's north polar hexagon is shown to contain myriad storms of various sizes, not the least of which is the remarkable and imposing vortex situated over the planet's north pole.

The north polar hexagon was first observed by Voyager. To see more of the hexagon, see The Persistent Hexagon and Spring Reveals Saturn's Hexagon Jet Stream.

This view is centered on Saturn's north pole. North is up and rotated 33 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 14, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 26 miles (42 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute