The smooth, linear contours and long, gently meandering character of the clouds in this view suggest stable prevailing winds at these latitudes, from 57 to 67 degrees north on Saturn.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 3, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 16 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.