This rare color view of Saturn's night side shows how the rings dimly
illuminate the southern hemisphere, giving it a dull golden glow. Part of
the northern dark side is just visible at top -- the illumination it
receives being far less than the south.
The unlit side of the rings is shown here. The portion of the rings
closest to Cassini is within the dark shadow of Saturn; the bright
distant portion is outside the planet's shadow.
A crescent Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) appears below
the rings at left.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 2, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.8
million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Saturn and 3.5 kilometers
(2.2 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is about 23 kilometers
(14 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
