Swirling clouds drift like phantoms in Saturn's murky depths.
The camera filter used for this image captures light at wavelengths where
atmospheric gases like methane are fairly transparent, allowing for
detailed views of deep cloud features.
Other filters (see PIA09859) use light that is strongly absorbed
by methane gas; the light bounces off the high clouds, making them
visible, but gets absorbed before it reaches the low clouds. The use of
such filters allows Cassini's cameras to probe Saturn's atmosphere at
different depths.
The view looks toward a region 22 degrees north of Saturn's equator. North
is up.The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera
on June 20, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (774,000 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.