October 16, 2008
The Cassini spacecraft looks upward at the swirling clouds of Saturn's southern hemisphere. The C and B rings are seen at right, beyond the planet's nightside limb.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 48 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 27, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 609,000 kilometers (378,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 33 kilometers (20 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.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute