Window Into Worlds

This stirring scene captures some of the grandeur of the Saturn system while also allowing a simultaneous glimpse beneath the hazes that cover both Saturn and Titan.

The infrared view reveals bright, swirling clouds and zonal cloud bands in the giant planet's atmosphere, as well as a hint of the dark, equatorial terrain on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across).

Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is visible near right, on the far side of the ringplane.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.6 million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 214 kilometers (133 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