The high clouds of Saturn's bright equatorial band appear to stretch like
cotton candy in this image taken by the Cassini narrow angle camera on
May 11, 2004. The icy moon Enceladus (499 kilometers, or 310 miles across)
is faintly visible below and to the right of the South Pole. The image was
taken from a distance of 26.3 million kilometers (16.3 million miles)
from Saturn through a filter centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale
is 156 kilometers (97 miles) per pixel. No contrast enhancement has been
performed on this image.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras,
were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based
at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.