South on Saturn

From beneath the ringplane, the Cassini spacecraft takes stock of Saturn's southern skies and peeks through the rings and beyond their shadows at the northern latitudes.

The image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of polarized infrared light. This type of infrared filter view allows Cassini's cameras to see through the planet's overlying haze and observe fine detail in its ever-moving cloud bands.

The image was obtained on Feb. 3, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 121 kilometers (75 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