Saturn's north pole hexagon, seen here in an image from the Cassini spacecraft, has been around for awhile. It was seen in Voyager images in the early 1980s, in ground-based telescopic images in the 1990s, and now with Cassini.

More and more of this unusually shaped feature will be revealed to Cassini's high resolution cameras as spring slowly comes to the northern hemisphere in the planet's 29-year orbit. The entire hexagon was imaged in thermal infrared by Cassini in Oct. 2006. This image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on January 21, 2009, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 930,000 kilometers (578,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 54 degrees. Image scale is 52 kilometers (32 miles) per pixel.

(Source: NASA Cassini Equinox Mission)