Northern Lights Crown Saturn

Glowing like a neon lasso, Saturn's aurora is seen spinning above Saturn's north pole over the course of most of a Saturn day in a movie made from multiple images taken by the ultraviolet imaging spectrograph on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.



'From Cassini's always-changing orbit around Saturn, fresh observations in ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths are being combined with other data to help characterize similarities and differences among the aurorae of Saturn, Jupiter and Earth,' said Wayne Pryor of Central Arizona College, Coolidge, Ariz., a co-investigator on Cassini's ultraviolet imaging spectrograph (UVIS) team. Pryor created the movie from spectrograph images taken May 25, 2007.