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Universe of the Hubble Space Telescope 2000 Calendar

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun, and Saturn's aurora is a glowing region of ionized gas that is produce by charged particles from the solar wind. Saturn's aurora was discovered by the Pioneer 11 spacecraft in 1979 and observed by the Saturn flybys of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in the early 1980s, but the first images of the aurora were not obtained until 1994 by the Hubble Space Telescope. This ultraviolet-light image of Saturn was obtained in October, 1997, when the planet was 810 million miles (1.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. In this image, the bright red features are produce by atomic hydrogen and the white features are produced by molecular hydrogen. The northern aurora is at the upper left, and the southern aurora is at the lower right.