Beyond the Limb

Turbulent swirls churn in Saturn's atmosphere while the planet's rings form a dazzling backdrop. The rings' complex structure is clearly evident in this view.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 15, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. The image scale is 28 kilometers (17 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute