The bright whorls and small-scale specks of convective clouds drift through a region just north of Saturn's bright equatorial band. Observers have seen major storms develop in this region in the past 15-20 years.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 13, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 15 kilometers (9 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.