Rivers of Cloud

Rippling with detail, the southern hemisphere of Saturn comes to life in this view from the Cassini spacecraft. Long, flowing streamers and bands of great contrast soften toward the pole, where a great hurricane-like storm resides.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 890 nanometers. The image was taken on Feb. 1, 2007 at a distance of approximately 945,000 kilometers (587,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 53 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 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