Northern Storms

Giant vortices swirl in the dim northern latitudes of Saturn.
PIA NumberPIA09787
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Giant vortices swirl in the dim northern latitudes of Saturn.

The high northern latitudes are slowly coming to light as Saturn heads into northern hemisphere spring.

The view is centered on a region 59 degrees north of Saturn's equator. North on Saturn is up and rotated 29 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 31, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 32 kilometers (20 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute