Magnificent Vista

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Caption:

Cassini coasts beneath giant Saturn, staring upward at its gleaming crescent and icy rings.

A great bull's-eye pattern is centered on the south pole, where a vast, hurricane-like storm spins.

This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 26 degrees below the ring plane. The view was acquired about two hours prior to PIA08347 .

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural-color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 30, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 61 kilometers (38 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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