Cassini’s Impressionistic View of Saturn

Cassini’s Impressionistic View of Saturn

To the Cassini spacecraft’s infrared eyes, Saturn’s graceful clouds sometimes take on the appearance of an impressionist’s painting of the giant planet.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft’s wide-angle camera on August 12, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.

Cassini was about 1.6 million kilometers from Saturn. The image scale is 92 kilometers per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

ENDS

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