The Cassini spacecraft observes the swirling features in Saturn's northern
cloud bands. Ring-cast shadows darken the planet's northern hemisphere at
increasingly lower latitudes.
In late 2004, not long after Cassini arrived in orbit (see PIA06177), the
shadows extended much farther north. Their southerly slide continues as
the seasons change on Saturn.
This view is centered on 25 degrees north latitude and was acquired from
about 39 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2008 using a spectral filter
sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The
view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers
(716,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 65 kilometers (41 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/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.