Imaged Saturn this morning and have resolved a rather interesting dark spot in IR.
Obviously Saturn is rather low at the moment so the seeing was not great but it will rise quite rapidly over the coming weeks. I measure the spot to be at Lat +30.4 L3 17.2
As the Sun came closer to the horizon the seeing dropped off considerably, the B channel for my RGB was very poor indeed. I started the session with 742nm IR data which turned out to be the best even though the later data was at higher alt.
Note that I have included an inset of the spot that has been more heavily sharpened, that is on the IR image "s2015-01-14_18-36_ir_tba"
I have also uploaded a polar projection of this IR data and the dark spot is also seen in the polar projection.
I had a look at the most recent 500 raw data sets from Cassini but the most recent runs have mainly been of Titan. There are a couple of Saturn images but none with this dark spot. I notice quite a stark difference between this latest IR polar projection and my final one from October 2nd 2014. I have attached the two polar projections to this message. The change in the contrast between the hexagon and the band of material immediately surrounding it has changed markedly between Oct 2014 and this morning, Jan 14th 2015.
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