Saturn's Poles

When I was painting up planets to hang as a model solar system I tracked down as many actual photographs as I could find. It was humbling to get to to know the modest amount of photos there were. I actually went to all the local libraries and went through VHS collections of NASA footage and computerized fly-bys too.

We are in an era of great discovery and in my lifetime photographing planets has advanced from images of a few pixels to high-resolution. It is still advancing. When I painted my version of Saturn a decade ago there were no pictures of its polar regions, so after spending hours painting in the greats swirls and storms of Saturn's equatorial belt I was stumped how to finish the tops and bottoms. My compromise, based on the educated guesses I was reading, was just to take a piece of sponge, dip it in greys and whites, and speckled the poles into skull-caps of clouds.
I always had ambiguous feeling about this choice, it looked unobtrusive, maybe too much so, as compared to the pizza-coloured swirling of the rest of the planet it seemed plain.

Last week NASA's Juno probe complete a 5-year trip out to Jupiter and got to do a 6-hour photo session with the planet - including our first photographs of the poles! I'm happy to see that the poles are swirling masses of clouds. No weird 'hexagon crown' like on Saturn

NASA/JPL Press Release wrote:
"First glimpse of Jupiter's north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "It's bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to -- this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We're seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features."

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-231

The Jovian polar layers are far beautifuler than I imagined/painted with a pearly iridescence sheen and dotted with pale 'rust spots' of massive storms (there are more photos at the link including some auroral shots using infrared). But the basic concept is the similar enough that I can touch-up my own guesses rather than re-do them.  There should be parades in the street or giant media celebrations at this sort of pioneering discovery but we can still raise a glass to Juno, the great data she got during her brief re-union with her spouse, and the humans who helped make that rendezvous possible.