My Blue Heaven

Saturn's atmosphere
May 3, 2007
PIA NumberPIA08932
Language
  • english

In Saturn's bluish north, day ends for the dreamy white clouds that stretch here into twilight.

This natural color scene shows middle latitudes in Saturn's north at excellent resolution, and with little detectable blur due to spacecraft motion.

North on Saturn is up and rotated 22 degrees to the right.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color view. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 1, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 86 degrees. Image scale is about 12 kilometers (7 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