Above the Storms

Great circular vortices churn through Saturn's northern skies. The planet wears the shadow of its rings as a dark belt.

Just above that belt is the shadow of 181-kilometer (113-mile) wide Janus.

This view was acquired from 38 degrees above the Saturn's equator.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 13, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 68 kilometers (42 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