Swirling Cloudtops of Saturn

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Saturn?s bright equatorial band displays an exquisite swirl near the planet?s eastern limb. This image was taken with the narrow angle camera on May 18, 2004, from a distance of 23.4 million kilometers (14.5 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to absorption and scattering of sunlight by methane gas in the infrared (centered at 889 nanometers). The image scale is 139 kilometers (86 miles) per pixel. No contrast enhancement has been performed on this image.

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.