CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Cloud Sketches

Cloud Sketches
PIA 08830
Avg Rating: 9.20/10

Full Size 1012x903:
JPEG 128 KB
PNG 429 KB
TIFF 915 KB
   Weather whirls on an alien world. Bright clouds swim in giant banks and shoals in Saturn's dreamlike atmosphere.

With the Sun low on the horizon, the three-dimensional shape of the clouds becomes more apparent here. Streaks of cloud rise above their surroundings, casting shadows toward the bottom of the image.

Some motion blur is apparent in this view.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers on Oct. 30, 2006. Cassini was then at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 143 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science InstituteNASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: December 6, 2006 (PIA 08830)
Image/Caption Information