Light and Dark Bands

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Caption:

Saturn's southern hemisphere boasts a great deal of fine detail in the turbulent boundaries between the atmospheric bands in this Cassini image. Note the faint bright spot in the band north of the dark polar region.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Sept. 3, 2004, at a distance of 9 million kilometers (5.6 million miles) from Saturn, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Sept. 10, 2004, at a distance of 8.8 million kilometers (5.5 million miles) from Saturn, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The image scale is 52 kilometers (32 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast enhanced to improve visibility of features in the atmosphere.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

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