It has been an exciting week or two for Saturn, our planetary next-door-neighbour-but-two.

Last week a paper in Nature reported that in the otherwise balmy tropics of Titan, Saturn’s moon, a storm was brewing. Emily Schaller at the University of Hawaii and colleagues have images from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. These show clouds forming a huge storm about the size of India. The existence of storm clouds in these tropical latitudes could finally help explain the presence of streams and rivers on the moon (press release).

Meanwhile on Saturn itself it is the equinox, where the Sun passes over the equator of Saturn and this has given Cassini, the spacecraft currently travelling around out near Saturn, the chance to gather some intriguing data. The equinox means that the rings cast long shadows, and from those shadows new bodies are emerging, like the small object seen in Saturn’s B ring on the main image to this post (press release).

Leader of Cassini’s imaging team Carolyn Porco told the BBC that we should expect more. “Over the next week or two, the [Cassini] imaging team will be poring over these precious gems to see what other surprises await us,” she said, with an assurance that any news would be announced as soon as possible.

Image: NASA