Through the atmosphere of the southern hemisphere of Saturn rolls a large
storm, seen here as a tight dark circle in the lower left of this image.
Horizontal strands of other atmospheric formations give the image the
fibrous look of travertine stone. Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles
across) is a small dark dot in the top right part of the image.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec.
30, 2008 using a combination of polarized and spectral filters sensitive
to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view
was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers
(750,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 27 degrees. Image scale is 68 kilometers (42 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.
