Just when NASA dazzles us with time lapses from the International Space Station (among other photographic goodies), they show us up-close photos of a hurricane on a DIFFERENT WORLD. We've known about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter for eons now, and it's viewable with any compact telescope. The hurricanes on the surface of Saturn, though, are a different story. In the visible spectrum, they don't really stand out from the light butterscotch color of the planet's hydrogen/helium atmosphere. Well, NASA just fixed that. The Cassini spacecraft, which was launched in 1994 to study Saturn, recently flew over the hurricane and took photos of the storm at various wavelengths of light, resulting in the spectacular image below:
NASA calls the storm "The Rose" (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)
The storm is the size of two Earths, and has wind speeds of over 300 miles an hour. That's something to take into account if you ever decide to take a spacecraft ride to our disc-donned neighbor in the Solar System.