Two Saturnian storms swirl in the region informally dubbed "storm alley"
by scientists. This mid-latitude region has been active with storms since
Cassini scientists began monitoring Saturn in early 2004.
The large storm at left is at least 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) across
from north to south. This is bigger than typical storms in the region,
which are the size of large Earth hurricanes, or about 1,000 kilometers
(600 miles) across. To the left, the smaller storm is about 700 kilometers
(400 miles) across.
The two storms are interacting. Their threadlike arms are intertwined, and
they might have merged a few days after this image was taken. See
PIA06082 and PIA06083 for movies of storm activity in this region.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Dec. 9, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2
million miles) from Saturn. The image was obtained using a filter
sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers.
The image scale is 38 kilometers (23 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
