Saturn's Northern Lights: Incredible new Nasa images show planet's glowing poles

A video and images are part of a new study that, for the first time, extracts information about Saturn’s aurora from the entire catalogue of images taken by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS) aboard Cassini.

The new, false-colour images show Saturn's aurora glowing in green around the planet's south pole over a 20 hour period, about two days on Saturn.

‘Detailed studies like this of Saturn's aurora help us understand how they are generated on Earth and the nature of the interactions between the magnetosphere and the uppermost regions of Saturn's atmosphere,’ said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Auroras on Saturn occur in a process similar to Earth's northern and southern lights.

via Saturn's Northern Lights: Incredible new Nasa images show planet's glowing poles | Mail Online.