A Storm Escapes the Shadows

A great storm swims in the cloud lanes of Saturn's high northern latitudes. Dark bands across the bottom of this view are shadows cast by the partly opaque rings. Cloud features are visible within the shadow of the A ring, below center.

The image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 8, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 37 kilometers (23 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute