A sliver of "ringshine" pierces the darkness of Saturn's night side.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 58
degrees above the ringplane.
The ring shadows fall into darkness beyond the terminator in the north.
South of the equator, a dim glow brightens the darkened globe. This light,
called ringshine, comes from sunlight reflected off the sunward side of
the expansive rings (the opposite face of the ringplane from this
perspective). The effect is pronounced in the eclipse view PIA08329.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on April 19, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 851,000 kilometers (529,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 48 kilometers (30 miles) 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.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
