Viewed nearly edge-on, Saturn's rings appear dark and pencil-thin against
the backdrop of the planet's swirling clouds.
Notable here are the shadows cast by the rings onto the northern
hemisphere, as well as details of the banded atmosphere, such as the
bright equatorial region.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb.
18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000
miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 727 nanometers, where gaseous methane absorbs. The image
scale is 67 kilometers (42 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.