Saturn eyeful

This natural colour image was taken on 27 March 2004 by the narrow angle camera on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. It was the last single ‘eyeful’ of Saturn and its rings achievable with this camera on approach to the planet.

From then on, Saturn and its rings will be larger than the field of view of the narrow angle camera.

Two faint dark spots are visible in the southern hemisphere. These spots are close to the latitude where Cassini saw two storms merging in mid-March. The fate of the storms visible here is unclear. They are getting close and will eventually merge or squeeze past each other.

The image is a composite of three exposures, in red, green and blue, taken when the spacecraft was 47.7 million kilometres from the planet. The image scale is 286 kilometres per pixel.