Saturn Enhanced

Saturn
May 31, 2007
PIA NumberPIA08952
Language
  • english

Stunning details in Saturn's clouds suggest movement within bands of atmosphere. This false color enhancement makes visible an exciting level of detail in the bright and dark bands that is more easily seen at Jupiter than at Saturn.

See Jupiter Clouds, True Color and False to Show Heights for natural and false color Cassini views of Jupiter.

Saturn's southern hemisphere seems to fade into the blackness of space in this view.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 (red channel), 890 (blue channel) and 728 (green channel) nanometers. The view was acquired on Feb. 2, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (600,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 57 kilometers (36 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