The video, embedded above as an animated GIF, consists of eight frames captured over a 10-hour period in December 2012 (for whatever reason — resource constraints, transmission speed, prioritization — NASA has only just finished processing the images). Each frame is actually fashioned out of 16 individual images — four shots, each captured with four different spectral filters. The filters are the important bit, as they allow Cassini to see a wide range of colors, from ultraviolet, to visible, to infrared light. The resulting image is actually false-color, to accentuate various features of the hurricane — further down the story you can see a true-color image of what you would see if you were actually orbiting Saturn.
In the video, the eye of the hurricane (the middle) is situated over Saturn’s north pole. The eye is about 50 times larger than the average hurricane eye here on Earth. The pinky-red blobs are separate vortices, which rotate independently of the hexagon and main hurricane (which always spin counterclockwise). The oval in the bottom right corner of the hexagon is about 2,200 miles across — or about twice the size of the largest hurricane to ever sweep our own planet. The hexagon is really damn big. The hexagon weather system has existed for at least 30 years (it was first observed by the Voyager mission in 1981), but it has probably been there for centuries. Just like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, we’re not entirely sure how or why Saturn’s hexagon continues to persist, when Earth-borne hurricanes (fortunately) die out fairly rapidly.
The video also clearly shows the hexagon’s “wall,” which is actually a barrier formed by the polar jet stream — a fast, narrow jet of air that forms due to the planet’s various regions of low and high pressure in the atmosphere.
From Extreme Tech
