This brooding portrait shows the southwest limb (edge) of the cold gas
giant and the thread-like cloud features lurking there. The limb appears
smooth, but at the terminator (the boundary between light and dark) and at
higher resolution, variations in cloud height can cause shadows that are
visible to Cassini (see PIA06596).
The image was taken in visible, red light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Oct. 30, 2005, at a distance of approximately
401,000 kilometers (249,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 155 degrees. Image scale is 20
kilometers (13 miles) per pixel. The image was 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 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.
