This spectacular image of Saturn's clouds looks obliquely across the high
northern latitudes. The Sun is low on the horizon here, making the
vertical extent of the clouds easier to see. Cloud bands surrounding the
vortex at lower left rise above their surroundings, casting shadows toward
the bottom of the image.
Some motion blur is apparent in this view.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using
a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at
938 nanometers on Oct. 30, 2006. Cassini was then at a distance of
approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 142 degrees. Image scale is 7
kilometers (4 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.