Rendered in myriad hues, vivid details of Saturn's stormy atmosphere play
out below the shadow of the rings.
A well defined storm swirls through the atmosphere of the southern
hemisphere in the lower left of the image, like the tight blue circle of
an eye's iris.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 36 degrees
below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral
filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were
obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 29, 2008 at
a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (680,000 miles) from
Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees.
Image scale is 60 kilometers (37 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.
