This bizarre scene shows the cloud-streaked limb of Saturn in front of the
planet's B ring. The ring's image is warped near the limb by the diffuse
gas in Saturn's upper atmosphere.
For additional examples of this effect, see PIA09810, PIA07521 and PIA06656.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 31 degrees
below the ringplane. North on Saturn is up.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
June 24, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 657,000 kilometers (408,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 4 kilometers (2 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.