Golden hues continue to creep northward on Saturn, subduing the blues and grays the Cassini spacecraft witnessed upon arrival in mid-2004.
This view was acquired from about 27 degrees above the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 23, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (780,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 71 kilometers (44 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.