The sharp change in brightness that runs diagonally across the center of
this image represents the boundary between Saturn's C and B rings.
This location sits at about 92,000 kilometers (57,200 miles) from Saturn.
The B ring (at lower left) appears darker than the C ring from this
perspective, above the unilluminated side of the rings, because the more
densely populated B ring strongly attenuates sunlight passing through it.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 7, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (888,000 miles) from Saturn, and
from about 32 degrees above the ringplane. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5
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.