Immense Vortices

A trio of large storms embraces in Saturn's high north. The three prominent vortices seen here are each wide enough to span the distance from New York City to Denver, or from London to Moscow.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 30 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 17, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (899,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 83 kilometers (52 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