This moody portrait of Saturn captures a razor-thin ringplane bisecting
the clouds of the bright equatorial region. The rings cast dark, shadowy
bands onto the planet's northern latitudes.
At left, Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is a tiny sunlit
orb against the planet's dark side.
The image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 7, 2005 at a distance of
approximately 3.1 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Saturn and
at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 96 degrees. Image scale is
179 kilometers (111 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.