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Electrical Storm on Saturn's Upper Troposphere (natural colors; credits: NASA)
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Caption NASA:"A bright, powerful, lightning-producing storm churns and coasts along the lane of Saturn's Southern Hemisphere nicknamed "Storm Alley" by scientists.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected this particular tempest after nearly 2 years during which Saturn did not appear to produce any large electrical storms of this kind. The storm appears as a bright, irregular splotch on the Planet near lower right.
Lightning flashes within the persistent storm produce radio waves, called Saturn Electrostatic Discharges, which the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument first detected on Nov. 27, 2007. Cassini's imaging cameras then spotted the storm, taking the images used to create this color view about a week later on Dec. 6, 2007.
This electrical storm is similar in appearance and intensity to those previously monitored by Cassini. All of these powerful electrostatic producing storms appeared at about 35° South Latitude on Saturn.
This storm has now been continuously tracked by Cassini for several months, whereas previous storms observed by the Spacecraft lasted for less than 30 days.
The view looks toward the un-illuminated side of the Rings from about 5° above the Ring-Plane. Tethys (about 1071 Km, or approx. 665 miles across) is seen here in the foreground, and casts its shadow onto the high Northern Latitudes.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approx. 1,7 MKM (1 MMs) from Saturn.
Image scale is roughly 97 Km (about 60 miles) per pixel".
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