Swirls Around the Middle

Saturn's bright equatorial region displays prominent swirls and eddies in this Cassini image taken on September 15, 2004.

The bright arc across the top of the image is Saturn's B ring, which was overexposed in this atmosphere-targeted image. Beneath this bright swath, the sheer C ring grants Cassini a view of thin shadows the rings cast onto the planet.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a distance of 8.5 million kilometers (5.6 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 101 kilometers (63 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 Office of Space Science, 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.

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