Now Watch This: Saturn Aurora Movie

By Nancy Atkinson - October 13, 2009 09:00 AM UTC | Planetary Science

Wow! This is really neat! We've long known that Saturn has aurorae, and the Cassini team recently took a series of images to see if they could catch an aurora in action near Saturn's north pole. As always, the folks at

UnmannedSpaceflight.com

are always on the lookout for the latest images being beamed back to Earth, and one of the UMSFer's, Astro0, saw this image series, realized what the Cassini team was trying to do, and used the images to put together this movie. You'll see Saturn's limb, moving stars, streaks that are likely cosmic ray hits, and flaring aurorae, or "curtains of light" that can sometimes rise 1,200 miles (2,000 km) above the cloud tops near Saturn's poles. Astronomers say that while aurorae on Earth shine for a few hours at most, on Saturn they can last for days. Additionally, if you were on Saturn, the aurora would look like a faint red glow. Most of the energy in Saturn's aurora is not in the form of visible light, though and instead they mostly glow in ultraviolet (UV) or infrared wavelengths.

Read our previous article about the infrared aurorae at Saturn.

Thanks

Astro0

, (with H/T to

Emily Lakdawalla)

!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com