The Cassini spacecraft views Saturn's southern latitudes in color, spying
a great, eye-shaped vortex just northward of the south polar region. Other
dark vortices, common features of Saturn's general circulation, are
visible in the mid-latitudes.
Contrast in the image was enhanced to make features in the atmosphere more
visible.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this near-natural color view. The images were taken in visible
light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 14, 2007 at a
distance of approximately 958,000 kilometers (595,000 miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 54 kilometers (33 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.