Whorls, streamers and eddies play in the banded atmosphere of a gas giant.
Strong image enhancement renders unto Saturn's clouds a grainy texture not
unlike sandstone. However, the loss in delicate smoothness is compensated
for by an increase in discernible detail.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a
combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 728 (green channel), 752 (red channel), and 890 (blue channel)
nanometers. The semi-transparent red features across the image are clouds
detected by the 752 nanometer filter.
The view was acquired on Aug. 19, 2005 at a distance of approximately
492,000 kilometers (306,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 26
kilometers (16 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.