Saturn puts on a mesmerizing display in this image from August 7, 2004.
Turbulent swirls and eddies are visible throughout the southern
hemisphere. In particular, the boundary of the dark southern polar region
displays a prominent oval-shaped storm near the lower right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a
distance of 8.4 million kilometers (5.2 million miles) from Saturn,
through a filter sensitive to infrared light. The image scale is 50
kilometers (31 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 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.