The Cassini spacecraft looks upward at the swirling clouds of Saturn's
southern hemisphere. The C and B rings are seen at right, beyond the
planet's nightside limb.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 48 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Aug. 27, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to
wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 609,000 kilometers (378,000 miles)
from Saturn. Image scale is 33 kilometers (20 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.