Saturn’s Spinning Hexagon in the Sky

A lot of fantastical space news in the past few months, I can’t believe I missed this one.

In March, NASA released images of a Saturn that show an odd hexagon formation spinning over it’s north pole. The pictures are stunning, especially the moving gif.

“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”