Cassini spacecraft's infrared eyes

To the Cassini spacecraft's infrared eyes, Saturn's graceful clouds sometimes take on the appearance of an impressionist's painting of the giant planet.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 12, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 994,000 miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 57 miles (92 kilometers) 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.