The southern edge of Saturn's equatorial band displays a scalloped
appearance in this Cassini image, as clouds of bright material are
stretched and pulled like taffy.
The shadow of Saturn's rings is visible through the thin C ring at upper
right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Sept. 13, 2004, at a distance of 8.6 million kilometers (5.3 million
miles) from Saturn, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light. The image scale is 103 kilometers (32 miles) per pixel. Contrast
was enhanced to improve visibility of features in the atmosphere.
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.