Saturn images to be displayed in New York

NEW YORK, April 21 (UPI) -- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says some of the best images from Saturn and the planet's rings and moons will be displayed in New York.

NASA officials said the exhibition, opening Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is entitled "Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission."

The exhibition, which runs through March 29, 2009, features about 50 dramatic images taken by the Cassini-Huygens mission in visible light, infrared and radar.

"The images show the Saturn system as we had never seen it before," said Joe Burns, a Cassini imaging scientist at Cornell University and the exhibit's guest co-curator. "We are excited to have the opportunity to show these breathtaking photographs to the broader public in one of the world's greatest science museums."

The Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit around Saturn for nearly four years and is the first orbiter to study Saturn in detail, NASA said. The piggybacked Huygens probe, provided by the European Space Agency, plunged through the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2005. Huygens was the first probe to land on the surface of a moon other than Earth's.