Bright puffs and ribbons of cloud drift lazily through Saturn's murky
skies. In contrast to the bold red, orange and white clouds of Jupiter,
Saturn's clouds are overlain by a thick layer of haze.
The visible cloud tops on Saturn are deeper in its atmosphere due to the
planet's cooler temperatures.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 18
degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue
spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The
images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on
April 15, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers
(906,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 84 kilometers (52 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.