Saturn's high north is a seething cauldron of activity filled with roiling
cloud bands and swirling vortices. A corner of the North Polar Hexagon is
seen at upper left.
This view looks toward a region located about 70 degrees north of the
planet's equator, in a place that receives continually increasing amounts
of sunlight as Saturn's seasons change.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug.
25, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 541,000 kilometers (336,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 29 kilometers (18 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.