Saturn's rings burst out of shadow and curve gracefully around the planet.
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across at its widest point) appears
as a bright speck touching the inside of the narrow F ring. Atlas (30
kilometers, 19 miles across at its widest point) is also visible, faintly,
upward and to the left of Prometheus, just outside the A ring edge.
Saturn's shadow cuts across the rings at top right.
Several dark, narrow spokes are faintly visible near the B-ring ansa, left
of center.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 13
degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue
spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The
images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July
4, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (775,000
miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 71 kilometers (44 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.
