The longest-lived continuously monitored electrical storm ever observed on
Saturn continues to churn through the tempest-tossed region nicknamed
"Storm Alley" because of its preponderance of storm activity.
This image of the storm was taken about five months after it was first
detected by Cassini's imaging cameras and the radio and plasma wave
science experiment (see PIA08410).
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about a
degree above the ringplane. The bands of the ring shadows blanket the
planet at the top of the scene.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April
23, 2008 using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths
of polarized infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (760,000
miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 70 kilometers (43 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.