Saturnian Squiggles

Storms whip up the cloud bands of Saturn's southern hemisphere in this infrared view. Small fractions of the A and F rings are visible at right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of light centered at 890 nanometers. The view was acquired on Dec. 1, 2006 at a distance of approximately 910,000 kilometers (566,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 130 degrees. Image scale is 51 kilometers (32 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