Wavy cloud bands in Saturn's atmosphere near the south pole show a great deal of delicate structure and contrast and even a bright storm in this view from Cassini.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Aug. 18, 2004, at a distance of 8.9 million kilometers (5.5 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 53 kilometers (33 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute