This spectacular and disorienting maze of lines is a Cassini portrait of
the gas giant Saturn, its rings and its small, icy moon Mimas. The rings
cast dark shadows across Saturn's northern hemisphere, creating a
photonegative effect: dark sections are dense and block the Sun, while
bright sections are less dense areas or gaps in the rings, which are more
transparent to sunlight.
Saturn's moon Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is seen here
against the backdrop created by the shadow of the dense B ring. Above
Mimas and the B ring shadow can be seen the broad gap of the Cassini
Division. The actual Cassini Division, which divides the A and B rings,
is visible about one-third of the way up from the bottom of the image.
This view was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 15, 2004, at a distance of approximately
4.7 million kilometers (2.9 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale
is 28 kilometers (17 miles) per pixel.
This image was taken from beneath the plane of Saturn's rings. It is
similar to the serene portrait provided by Cassini in a natural color
view from November, 2004 (see PIA06142).
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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.