Saturn dominates this colorful view, taken from a vantage point high above
the rings. From here the Cassini spacecraft can see the rings' far side,
where the dark shadow of Saturn abruptly terminates their visibility.
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) casts its shadow onto the
planet's northern latitudes below center.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 27
degrees above the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 26, 2008 at a distance of
approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 93 kilometers (58 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.