Dreamy colors ranging from pale rose to butterscotch to sapphire give this
utterly inhospitable gas planet a romantic appeal. Shadows of the rings
caress the northern latitudes whose blue color is presumed to be a
seasonal effect.
Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) hugs the ringplane right
of center.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this color view, which approximates what the human eye would see.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March
16, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3
million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 102 degrees. Image scale is 120 kilometers (75 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.