Feathery cloud bands fill Saturn's graceful crescent. Features in the
atmosphere are visible all the way to the terminator, the boundary between
night and day, where the Sun's rays are coming in almost horizontally.
Because it is possible to see down to the same level, regardless of how
high the Sun is above the horizon, this indicates that the atmosphere
above the clouds is relatively clear.
The dark line across the top of the image is the nearly edge-on ringplane.
The image was taken in infrared light (centered at 728 nanometers) with
the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 31, 2005, at a distance
of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at
a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 131 degrees. Image scale is 69
kilometers (43 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.