In the NY Times yesterday or so was a great picture of a large hexagonal cloud structure about one of the poles, having a scale of 15,000 km.

Sorry, 15,000 miles or 25,000 km.

The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain.

 

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=735

It is beautiful and strange to see such a straight structure coming from a fluid medium. A friend (WBW) responded saying oh that's minimum packing, but these are large fluid forms presumably from vortexes.

Yeah its pretty strange to look at.

I want to know when form emerges from chaos. Do you know how we got the word 'chaos'? The Greeks, who had a story for everything, included the god of KAOS, which is so obviously part of life, like, what happens after you make plans. At the very least, this would help my personal feng sui.

My brother, Steve, who works at NOAA modelling mesoscale weather, twisters in the US Midwest, offers this: N'wa,

Yes, this is an improved image of the feature that was discovered by Voyager circa 1980. Looks mystical, though it is likely a six wave pattern at high latitudes where the curvatures involved cancel out into a near hexagon...

 

S'crunch

Would it be churlish to point out that the hexagonal pattern was predicted before the Voyager mission and was therefore no surprise to some people?

JohnB, I simply am impressed, both by what I'm seeing and by people who predicted it.

Mate, it is impressive. I've seen some time lapse footage from the Voyager missions and you can actually see the clouds turn the corners as they go around this thing.

 

It would have to be one of the strangest and most magnificent sights I've seen in this system of ours.

Way cool, JohnB. I'd like to see this. I have not seen hexagons in the sky since last I ate psychedelics. BECAUSE THE SKY IS BLUE, IT TURNS ME ON! False color, magenta, whatever. Hoist up yer sails.

My brother reports this study: http://www.physorg.com/news66924222.html . We're on our way again to the coffee cup with <m=13>.

I will explain this reference and wish someone knew how to put in the picture of water in a rotating pan of some sort manifesting different polygonal shapes at different speeds of a lower plate (with fixed walls). "Hoist up the JohnB sails; see how the mainsail sets..."