This is a highly detailed look at the feathery, wavelike patterns in the
cloud bands of Saturn's southern hemisphere. Near the center, long
filaments wrap around a swirling vortex. Notable is the extreme change
in appearance at very high southern latitudes.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera on Dec.
14, 2004, at a distance of 595,000 kilometers (370,000 miles) from Saturn,
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at
890 nanometers. It has been highly processed to enhance details. The image
scale is about 32 kilometers (20 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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For images visit the Cassini imaging team home page
http://ciclops.org.
