Bands and swirls in infrared

Saturn's bright equatorial band displays an exquisite swirl near the planet's eastern limb. This image was taken with the Cassini-Huygens narrow-angle camera on 18 May 2004, from a distance of 23.4 million kilometres from Saturn.

The camera used a filter sensitive to absorption and scattering of sunlight by methane gas in the infrared (centred at 889 nanometres). The image scale is 139 kilometres per pixel. No contrast enhancement has been performed on this image.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency.