This strongly enhanced false color view is a departure from the familiar
bluish north and golden south seen in natural color Cassini spacecraft
images, but the contrast between regions north and south of the ring
shadows is here more readily apparent.
The northern region is marked by a multitude of bright, patchy clouds. The
region south of the ring shadows contains the bright equatorial band seen
in many monochrome Cassini views taken at infrared wavelengths (see PIA07590).
Taken just minutes after PIA08936, this view makes Saturn's rings faintly
visible at lower left. The false color enhancement brings out additional
detail in the planet's clouds that is not visible in the natural color
view.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 52
degrees above the ringplane.
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 (red channel), 752 (blue channel) and 890 (green channel)
nanometers. The view was acquired on April 5, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
