Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Several dark spots, or storms, are huddled in the mid-latitude region of Saturn’s southern hemisphere. The largest of these storms is about 3000 kilometers (1860 miles) across, or about as wide as Japan is long. Also visible are light-colored, lacy cloud patterns indicative of atmospheric turbulence. The image was taken with the narrow angle camera through a near-infrared filter on May 7, 2004 from a distance of 28.2 million kilometers (17.5 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 168 kilometers (104 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.
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 imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Original Source: CICLOPS News Release