NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured something trippy: A high-resolution movie of a unique six-sided air current known as the hexagon. The color images show the tumultuous jet stream around Saturn’s north pole and are the first of their kind. The winds swirl at around 200 miles per hour, and are the only known instance of this sort of weather pattern in the solar system.

“The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries.”

While weather events on Earth are interrupted when they come in contact with a solid mass, Saturn is essentially a large ball of gas and lacks these interrupters. Better views of the hexagon are available now because the sun began to illuminate its interior in late 2012. Cassini captured images of the hexagon over a 10-hour time span with high-resolution cameras, giving scientists a good look at the motion of cloud structures within. Scientists also use black and white images from Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer to analyze the wind movements.

Scientists rendered the images in color so that they could more easily spot differences in the kinds of particles that make up the visible haze as they’re suspended in Saturn’s atmosphere.

“Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. “The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth’s Antarctic ozone hole.”

These clear views of the hexagon are so visible now because the sun began to illuminate the interior in late 2012. Only recently, with the start of Saturn’s northern spring in August 2009, did sunlight begin bathing the planet’s northern hemisphere at all.

“As we approach Saturn’s summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

It is, without question, a storm in which no Earthling would want to get caught.