Representative Color:
Saturn

The infrared light Hubble captured to make this image of Saturn is invisible to human eyes. We added colors to reveal details that our eyes might see if they were sensitive to infrared light.

We assigned the color blue to the shortest-wavelength infrared light, red to the longest-wavelength infrared light, and green to the intermediate-wavelength infrared light.

The colorful bands arise because chemical differences in Saturn’s upper cloud layers cause those clouds to reflect sunlight in different ways.

Near the equator, Saturn’s upper cloud layers strongly reflect the infrared light represented here by the colors red and green, which combine to make yellow in this kind of color reconstruction. Closer to the poles, the upper cloud layers are not so reflective and we can see down to the main cloud layer, which strongly reflects the kind of infrared light represented here by blue.

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