On High

From its unique perspective high above the planet, the Cassini spacecraft looks down upon Saturn's murky northern hemisphere. The bluish hues seen in some Cassini views of Saturn's north are notably absent in this viewing geometry.

The dark side of Saturn's extensive rings is just visible in the top half of the image.

The view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 44 degrees above the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 30, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 150 degrees. Image scale is 78 kilometers (49 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.