Let’s take a look back at our own planet for a moment with this stunning photo captured from the Space Station. This shot, taken on the night of Aug. 10, 2015, shows lightning flashes in thunderstorms over southern Mexico. Along the right edge bright red and purple streamers can be seen extending high into the…
Tag: storms
Storms on Uranus Observed From Hawaii
Wrapped in an atmosphere tinted pale blue by high-altitude methane, Uranus has occasionally been observed to develop large storms in its frigid windy skies. NASA’s Voyager 2 saw a few small storm clouds spotting Uranus during its flyby in Jan. 1986, and more recently some large but short-lived storms were observed by Hubble and the…
Saturn’s Stunning, Swirling Cyclone
Oh man. It’s stuff like this that got me into space blogging in the first place. Landing here on Earth last night, this is one of several new raw images from Cassini acquired yesterday (Nov. 27) showing the enormous cyclone of clouds swirling around Saturn’s geographic north pole. The angle of sunlight highlights the multilayered…
Saturn’s “Storm Alley”
Dark swirling vortices march along Saturn’s “storm alley” in this section of an image taken by Cassini on May 19, 2008. (It was recently uploaded as a featured image on JPL’s Flickr page.) Storms on Saturn are huge and powerful, with winds blowing many hundreds of miles per hour and often featuring lightning ten thousand…
Methane Skies
In this raw image from Cassini, giant scallop-edged cloud patterns become visible in Saturn’s atmosphere with camera filters specially designed to detect methane. Light and dark banding of the clouds at various latitudes are also extremely distinctive through this filter. Although mostly hydrogen and helium, Saturn’s atmosphere does contain elements like methane and ammonia. Saturn’s…
Eddies and Whirls
Storms of varying sizes churn in Saturn’s northern hemisphere in this true-color image taken by the Cassini orbiter on November 29, 2008. The reason for the blue color is still not known, but it seems to fade with the winter season coming to an end. This photo was taken from a distance of 683,000 miles…
Lights in the Dark 