Cloud Sketches

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Caption:

Weather whirls on an alien world. Bright clouds swim in giant banks and shoals in Saturn's dreamlike atmosphere.

With the Sun low on the horizon, the three-dimensional shape of the clouds becomes more apparent here. Streaks of cloud rise above their surroundings, casting shadows toward the bottom of the image.

Some motion blur is apparent in this view.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers on Oct. 30, 2006. Cassini was then at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 143 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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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