So Many Swirls

From high above the ringplane, the Cassini spacecraft captures a multitude of storms in the blustery cloud bands of Saturn's high north.

This view looks toward the planet from about 72 degrees north of the equator.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 26, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 397,000 kilometers (246,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 20 kilometers (13 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