This infrared view of Saturn’s southern hemisphere shows the bright, high altitude equatorial band at top, and the now familiar dark bull’s-eye that marks the planet’s south pole. At the mid-latitudes in between, several storms swirl across the planet. This image was taken using a compression scheme that allows more images to be taken by Cassini – and stored on its flight data recorder, which has limited space – at the expense of some data quality. Due to the compression, the image retains a blocky, or "pixelated", quality after enhancement. Despite these artifacts, such "lossy" compression can be useful for increasing the number of images that can be taken and relayed back to Earth. The image was taken with the wide angle camera on July 31, 2005, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers from a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 35 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 77 kilometers (48 miles) per pixel.

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