Weather whirls on an alien world. Bright clouds swim in giant banks and
shoals in Saturn's dreamlike atmosphere.
With the Sun low on the horizon, the three-dimensional shape of the clouds
becomes more apparent here. Streaks of cloud 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 (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 143 degrees. Image scale is 7
kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.
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.