Sunlit South

This poetic wide-angle camera view of Saturn reveals several small, dark storms in the southern latitudes, where storm activity has been prevalent since before Cassini arrived in orbit.

Also notable here is the semi-transparent C ring, which is visible against the backdrop of the planet.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 23, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 1028 nanometers and at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 142 kilometers (88 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Credit:NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Space Science Institute