NASA’s Cassini spacecraft looked toward Saturn and its moon Tethys on Feb. 18, and saw a large and powerful storm continuing to rage in the planet’s southern hemisphere.
Cassini first observed the storm beginning in late January. At the time, it was already large and bright enough to be seen with even modest-sized telescopes on Earth.
The fact that the storm stands out against the subtle banding of Saturn at visible wavelengths suggests the storm’s cloud tops are relatively high in the atmosphere.
Cassini took the image in visible light with its wide-angle camera, at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 162 kilometers (101 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.
