Blustery Bands

The Cassini spacecraft presents a tempestuous scene in which the clouds of Saturn's bright equatorial region entwine with those in darker, southerly latitudes.

See Seeing High in the Sky for a previously released wide-angle view of Saturn using the same spectral filter.

The image was taken using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 890 nanometers. The image was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 16, 2006 at a distance of approximately 289,000 kilometers (180,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 14 kilometers (8 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute