Saturn's semitransparent rings arc smoothly around the gas giant, abruptly
disappearing where they pass through the planet's shadow.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 18
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 15, 2008 using a spectral filter
sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The
view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers
(907,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 84 kilometers (52 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.