Swirls around Saturn's waist
Saturn's bright equatorial region displays prominent swirls and eddies in this image taken on 15 September 2004, by the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.
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 area, the almost-transparent C ring grants Cassini-Huygens a view of thin shadows the rings cast onto the planet.
The image was taken with the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of 8.5 million kilometres from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 101 kilometres per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
