PIA08263: Clouds at Dawn
 Target Name:  Saturn
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Wide Angle
 Product Size:  651 x 836 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA08263.tif (545 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA08263.jpg (49.85 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Saturn's clouds billow and swirl in the turbulent zones of shear between eastward- and westward-flowing jets. This view looks toward the terminator on Saturn, where night gives way to day.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The image was obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 16, 2006 at a distance of approximately 338,000 kilometers (210,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Image scale is 17 kilometers (10 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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2006-09-20