A great dark storm stares out from Saturn in this Cassini image, showing how beautiful and intricate the planet's atmosphere can be. Turbulent areas represent the boundaries between air masses moving at different velocities.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 6, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3.3 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 889 nanometers. The image scale is 39 kilometers (24 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.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute