NASA's Hubble telescope captures stunning image of summertime on Saturn, see picture

NASA’s Hubble telescope has yet again captured a stunning visual of planet Saturn, showcasing summertime on its northern hemisphere. The photograph was taken as part of Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy(OPAL) on July 4 and captured the “opulent giant” when it was 839 million miles from earth.

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Image credits: NASA

Saturn and its two moons 

The picture shows an illuminated Saturn accompanied by two of its moons. While Mimas could be spotted on the planet’s right side, Enceladus could be seen at its bottom.  Along with picture, the Space agency explained that Hubble also found a lot of atmospheric storms, which are transient features of the planet.

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“The banding in the northern hemisphere remains pronounced as seen in Hubble's 2019 observations, with several bands slightly changing colour from year to year. The ringed planet's atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium with traces of ammonia, methane, water vapour, and hydrocarbons that give it a yellowish-brown colour,” NASA wrote on its website.

In addition, it also revealed that Hubble spotted a slight reddish haze over the northern hemisphere speculating that it may be due to increased sunlight, “which could either change the atmospheric circulation or perhaps remove ices from aerosols in the atmosphere”.  It also presented an alternate theory stating that the increased sunlight in summer months probably leads to aa change in the amount of photochemical haze produced on the planet.

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Only a few days ago, the Hubble Space Telescope had  shared an image portraying the sparkling stars of a ‘dwarf galaxy’ located around 15 million light-years away. While in the picture other galaxies’ appear to be ‘sprinkled across the frame’, the scientists noticed that towards the lower right corner of the frame, two elongated streaks, trails of asteroids, are faintly visible. While sharing the image on Twitter, the Hubble space informed that the ‘citizen scientists’ captured ‘one galaxy and two asteroids’.