Storms and cloud bands emerge from beneath Saturn's obscuring hazes in this infrared view.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 20 degrees below the ringplane. The inner rings partly obscure the planet at top.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 12, 2005 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn. The monochrome view uses a combination of images taken using spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of light centered at 728, 752 and 890 nanometers. Image scale is 170 kilometers (105 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.