Storms of the High North

Clouds and hurricane-sized vortices in Saturn's northern skies
PIA NumberPIA10413
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Sinuous clouds and hurricane-sized vortices mingle in Saturn's northern skies.

This view looks toward a region located at 70 degrees north latitude on Saturn.

Despite the level of detail visible here, the region shown is wide enough to contain the planet Mars comfortably.

The image was taken with Cassini's CB1 spectral filter, which is sensitive to wavelengths of visible red light centered at 619 nanometers. The view was acquired with the spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on May 23, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (775,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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