Dark shadows are an ever-present part of Saturn's already twilit world,
where the Sun's rays are a hundred times more feeble than at Earth.
Here, the rings cast their silhouette upon the planet, which reciprocates
with its own shade upon the rings at upper right. The moon Tethys also
casts a dark spot onto Saturn's clouds.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 21
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 25, 2008 using a spectral filter
sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The
view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1
million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 94 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/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
