Voyager 1 Saturn Images – Convective features

An orange-blue-violet color composite showing Saturn's northern hemisphere in approximately true color/contrast and a greatly enhanced version. This filter combination is not optimal for true color images but nevertheless the true color version should be fairly close to Saturn's real color. The enhanced version has been heavily processed to reveal subtle color differences. The blue areas are areas where blue color is a bit stronger relative to red/green than elsewhere but they are not blue; they are simply slightly less yellow than other areas. In the red areas the red color is slightly stronger relative to green/blue than it is elsewhere etc. A bright convective feature above center is prominent; special care was taken not to 'saturate' the brightest area during processing. Interestingly, the processing reveals that the color of the northern half of the bright band containing the 'ribbon' differs slightly from the color of its southern half. The images used in this color composite were obtained by Voyager 1 on November 5, 1980 at a range of 10 million km.