Cassini caught this intriguing view of a dark storm near the limb of
Saturn on Sept. 9, 2004. The image shows a great deal of detail in the
gas giant's turbulent atmosphere.
The bright triangle at right is an overexposed part of Saturn's A ring,
with the F ring faintly visible beneath.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a
distance of 8.8 million kilometers (5.5 million miles) from Saturn,
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image
scale is 104 kilometers (65 miles) per pixel. The image was magnified by
a factor of two and slightly contrast-enhanced to improve visibility of
features in the atmosphere.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science,
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 and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.