Flecks of bright cloud and several dark storms dominate Saturn's southern polar region in this Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera image taken on August 18, 2004. The bull's-eye pattern near the bottom of the planet marks the south pole.
The image was taken at a distance of 8.9 million kilometers (5.6 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 54 kilometers (33 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
