One of the last images of a full Saturn, taken by the Cassini-Huygens mission before the ringed world became too close and too large to fit in the spacecraft's image viewer. The high clouds of Saturn's bright equatorial band appear to stretch like cotton candy in this image taken by the Cassini narrow angle camera on May 11, 2004. The icy moon Enceladus (499 kilometers, or 310 miles across) is faintly visible below and to the right of the South Pole. The image was taken from a distance of 16.3 million miles (26.3 million kilometers) from Saturn through a filter centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 97 miles (156 kilometers) per pixel. No contrast enhancement has been performed on this image.

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 Office of Space Science, 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.

Cassini is now steering toward the small Saturnian moon of Phoebe following a six-minute course correction last week. During that short engine burn, Cassini used all the systems it will muster for its orbital approach with Saturn on June 30. [read more]

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute