This infrared view of Saturn's southern hemisphere shows the bright, high
altitude equatorial band at the top, and the now familiar dark bull's-eye
that marks the planet's south pole. At the mid-latitudes in between,
several storms swirl across the planet.
This image was taken using a compression scheme that allows more images
to be taken by Cassini. They are stored on its flight data recorder,
which has limited space - at the expense of some data quality. Due to the
compression, the image retains a blocky, or "pixilated," quality after
enhancement. Despite these artifacts, such compression can be useful for
increasing the number of images that can be taken and relayed back to
Earth.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July
31, 2005, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 728 nanometers at a distance of approximately 1.3 million
kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 35 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 77
kilometers (48 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.