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Universe of the Hubble Space Telescope 2001 Calendar

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun, named after the Roman god of agriculture and identified with the Greek god Cronus. Saturn is the second-largest planet in the solar system, with a diameter of 119,000 km (74,000 mi), a mass 95 times the mass of Earth, an orbital period of 29.5 years, and an average distance of around 1.4 billion km (900 million mi). This image, which was obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope in late 1994, shows a rare storm, which is visible as a white feature near the equator of the planet, above the rings. The white clouds of the storm are composed of ammonia ice crystals, which form when an upward flow of warm gas moves upward through Saturn's cold cloud tops.