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Saturn or Van Gogh?
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Saturn's turbulent atmosphere is reminiscent of a Van Gogh painting in this view. However, unlike the famous impressionist painter, Cassini records the world precisely as it appears to the spacecraft's cameras.
The feathery band that cuts across from the upper left corner to the right side of this scene has a chevron, or arrow, shape near the right. The center of the chevron is located at the latitude (about 28° South) of an eastward-flowing zonal jet in the atmosphere. Counter-flowing eastward and westward jets are the dominant dynamic features seen in the giant planet atmospheres. A chevron-shaped feature with the tip pointed East means that this is a local maximum in the eastward wind and a region of horizontal wind shear where clouds to the North and South of the jet are being swept back by the slower currents on the sides of the jet.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 6, 2005, at a distance of approx. 2,5 MKM from Saturn using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel.
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