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One "Eye" of Saturn!
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Gaseous Saturn rotates quickly - once every approx. 10,8 hours - and its horizontal cloud bands rotate at different rates relative to each other. These conditions can cause turbulent features in the atmosphere to become greatly stretched and sheared, creating the beautiful patterns that the Cassini spacecraft observes. This turbulence and shear is particularly notable at those boundaries where the different bands slide past each other.
Vortices like the one seen here are long-lived dynamical features that are part of the general circulation of Saturn's atmosphere. They are counterparts to the East-West flowing jets and can last for months or years. They probably grow by merging with other vortices until a few dominate a particular shear zone between two jets.
This image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 7, 2006, at a distance of approximately2,9 MKM (such as about 1,8 MMs) from Saturn. The image scale is 17 Km (about 10 miles) per pixel.
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