That alliteration was almost all unintentional. >_>
So hey if you're like me, the huge hexagonal storm around Saturn's north pole that I talked about yesterday might have got you wondering what's the planet's south pole is like. Well it's kind of like this:
image by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute (source)
According to the NASA/JPL page about it, that's a 8,000 kilometer (5,000 mile)-wide hurricane, its winds whipping 30 to 75 kilometer (20 to 45 mile)-high walls of clouds--those are "two to five times taller than the clouds of thunderstorms and hurricanes on Earth"--around at "550 kilometers (350 miles) per hour"--nearly twice the speed of the most powerful hurricanes recorded on Earth. You can even see a sorta movie of them (mpg format) on that page, compiled from a sequence of photos by the Cassini probe.
Oh, so just a hurricane 2/3rds of the Earth's diameter? Yep. :o Of course they don't really know what's causing it, and those dark clouds at the bottom of the eye are a mystery--they're about twice as deep into the atmosphere as we can usually see--but it could have something to do with the planet actually being "2 Kelvin (4 degrees Fahrenheit)" warmer at the pole. As some NASA dude put it, "the winds decrease with height, and the atmosphere is sinking, compressing and heating over the South Pole."
Man our planet's poles are pretty boring compared to Saturn's! Until we find the frozen ancient alien astronauts, anyway.
If you said it's the 25,000-kilometer-wide hexagonal storm system at Saturn's north pole, as seen by Cassini in infrared in 2007, you'd be right! (Good work! :D) According to NASA/JPL's article on it, the storm is at least a semi-permanent feature of the gas giant, having been spotted by the Voyager spacecraft in their flybys of the planet in 1980 and 1981. The light areas are a depression that drops some 100 km into Saturn's atmosphere. Check that article for more pictures and an animated sequence of its rotation, compiled from Cassini images.
The entire structure rotates with a period of 10h 39m 24s, the same period as that of the planet's radio emissions, which is assumed to be equal to the period of rotation of Saturn's interior. [...]
The pattern's origin is a matter of much speculation. Most astronomers believe it was caused by some standing-wave pattern in the atmosphere; but the hexagon might be a novel aurora. Polygonal shapes have been replicated in spinning buckets of fluid in a laboratory.
So yeah it's kind of a mystery, and just goes to show how little we really know of Saturn's inner workings.
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I'd been kind of wondering how I was going to do a space scene in this whole ink wash thing I've been using for the comic lately, and in this case at least the answer was to go wet-on-wet and let the ink sort of run itself across the page to get some nebula-type action going. There were a few surprises but overall it seemed to work okay. When I did those sorta dark tendrils above the back end of the ship (the one with the probably exaggerated flame coming out :P) I was thinking of the Pillars of Creation, an intricate star-forming region in the Eagle Nebula captured in a rather spectacular and famous photo by Hubble in 1995.
Oh! And I don't usually do this but the sequence of this ship will be somewhat broken up so I thought I might as well give it a shot: the ship is shown here in the correct braking attitude, ie it is facing backwards, firing its main thruster to decelerate as it approaches its destination, which may be somewhere in the region of the big star on the right. I don't usually draw braking ships the correct backward way because it's kind of hard to tell which way they're going when you do that. Hm so this will just confuse the issue even more since I'm being inconsistent now. Oh well!
Did you know where in the middle of the strongest solar storm since 2005? Well it's true, according to that there article. But it isn't exactly causing telegraph stations to burst into flame as far as I know, so presumably we'll survive. Here's a video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory of one of the flares that presumably shot some of the Sun-stuff our way:
That's only an M8.7 flare, which is kinda biggish relatively speaking, but almost ten times weaker than the X6.9 flare we had last summer, for instance, and twenty times weaker than the X17 flare seen in last big storm, the one in 2005. And the biggest flare ever measured with modern instruments, according to Wikipedia, was a 2003 flare clocking in at a meaty X28--but that was actually just the maximum amount the monitoring instrument at the time could measure, and analysis of that flare's effects suggest it could have been up around an X45; still didn't burn down telegraph offices like the "Carrington Super Flare" in the Solar Superstorm of 1859, which could be seen by the naked eye (!) (and not that you should look at the Sun directly anyway!), so I guess maybe even the X-scale of solar flares isn't all that. Would they have needed a new scale (Z??) for the flare Carrington saw?
Still, with all the flares over the weekend or so this is the biggest sustained storm the SDO--which is only about two years old--has been able to watch (and film) with its mighty instruments, so you can't blame them for hyping it a bit!
