The Cassini spacecraft continued to track Saturn's moon Prometheus after
it disappeared behind the planet, capturing a few fortunate,
high-resolution views of the clouds in Saturn's high north.
PIA10463 was taken an hour earlier, just before the moon vanished behind
Saturn. Later, when Prometheus reappeared from behind the planet, Cassini
was waiting to take more images.
The view is centered on a region located about 70 degrees north of
Saturn's equator. North is toward the top of the image and rotated 28
degrees to the right. The vortices seen here are among the swarm of bright
spots seen in PIA10449, just south of the north polar hexagon.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 9, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.