The latitude bands and swirling storms of Saturn, always intriguing to
scientists, often are exquisitely beautiful as well. The turbulent
atmosphere is dotted with storms; most are small, but some are much
larger. The dark center of the dramatic beauty swirling near the south
pole is easily 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on July 31, 2005, using a filter sensitive to
wavelengths of polarized infrared light centered at 752 nanometers at a
distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from
Saturn. The image scale is 78 kilometers (48 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
