Photos

The colourful globe of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, passes in front of the planet and its rings in this true colour snapshot from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, one of the most promising locations in the search for a place where life can be sustained, is seen in stunning detail.
PHOTOGRAPH BY  CASSINI IMAGING TEAM,  SSI,  JPL,  ESA,  NASA

A halo surrounds Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Titan's atmosphere, almost entirely nitrogen, extends some 600 kilometres into space—ten times as far as Earth's atmosphere.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Saturn's northern hemisphere appears blue in this natural-color photograph taken by Cassini in December 2004. During its four-year tour of Saturn, Cassini will complete 74 orbits of the ringed planet and 44 close flybys of the moon Titan.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Clouds swirl on Saturn, the second largest planet in our solar system. Like its bigger neighbor Jupiter, Saturn is a gas planet made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its magnetic field is 578 times more powerful than Earth's.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

The Cassini spacecraft surveys Saturn's outstretched ring system in infrared from a vantage point high above the planet's northern latitudes. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings, but Saturn's are by far the largest and most spectacular.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Saturn's rings appear blue in this false-color image taken from Cassini. The planet's northern hemisphere is about twice as bright as its southern hemisphere, because high-level, fine particles are about half as prevalent in the northern hemisphere as in the south. These particles block Saturn's glow more strongly, making it look brighter in the north.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

A six-sided feature encircles Saturn's north pole in this 2006 image. The hexagon was first observed in the early 1980s, proving that the feature—whatever it is—is long lived. This photo was taken using Saturn's thermal glow, hence the red hue.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

Saturn's otherworldly rings encircle the planet and extend out for hundreds of thousands of kilometres. The rings—there are thousands—are made up of billions of ice and rock particles, thought to be pieces of comets, asteroids, or shattered moons.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Two of Saturn's more than 60 known moons are barely visible in this picture of the ringed planet. Mimas, at the upper right, has an enormous impact crater on one side, and Tethys, at the bottom, has a huge rift zone called Ithaca Chasma that runs nearly three-quarters of the way around the moon.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

A total of 126 images taken over the course of two hours make up this mosaic picture of Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft snapped the photos on October 6, 2004, when it was approximately 6.3 million kilometres from Earth.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

In this photograph taken in the Cassini spacecraft's 12th year orbiting Saturn, the ring shadows appear to obscure almost the entire southern hemisphere, while the planet's north pole and its six-sided jet stream, known as "the hexagon," are fully illuminated by the sun.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE