Don’t you get tired of summer? Saturn Northern hemisphere is also in the throes of the season, and the Hubble space telescope has captured a stunning new photo of the ringed planet to celebrate.
The photo is part of a long-running program called Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy, through which Hubble uses each year to monitor the weather on Saturn, Jupiter, and other distant worlds. Since the last image, taken in 2019, the saturn atmosphere The northern hemisphere has become a little redder, while its southern hemisphere has become a little more blue.
“It is surprising that even in a few years we are seeing seasonal changes on Saturn,” said lead researcher Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement on Thursday (July 24).
Related: Saturn’s glorious rings up close in photos
Hubble captured the new image on July 4, when Saturn was about 839 million miles (1.35 billion km) from Earth.
The redder northern hemisphere probably comes from sunnier conditions that accompany the local summer, according to the statement. Increased sunlight could warm the northern hemisphere a little and interfere with local atmospheric composition or create haze.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
Hubble also saw two of Saturn’s moons in the new image: on the right is Mimas, which sports a huge crater that covers a large part of its surface, and to the bottom is Ice Enceladus, one of the most intriguing targets for scientists to understand whether life exists elsewhere in our solar system.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
