Saturn's clouds billow and swirl in the turbulent zones of shear between
eastward- and westward-flowing jets. This view looks toward the terminator
on Saturn, where night gives way to day.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The image was obtained with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 16, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 338,000 kilometers (210,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Image scale is 17
kilometers (10 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.