Serenity Above, Tempests Below

Whiffs of cloud dance in Saturn's atmosphere, while the dim crescent of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) hangs in the distance.

The dark ringplane cuts a diagonal across the top left corner of this view.

The image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 6, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 35 kilometers (22 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