Great circular vortices churn through Saturn's northern skies. The planet
wears the shadow of its rings as a dark belt.
Just above that belt is the shadow of 181-kilometer (113-mile) wide Janus.
This view was acquired from 38 degrees above the Saturn's equator.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan.
13, 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 (746,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 68 kilometers (42 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.