Saturn's rings create a brilliant halo around the turbulent giant planet.
Here, the Cassini spacecraft looks into Saturn's clouds using a spectral
filter sensitive to absorption by methane. Light that reaches down to
depths where methane is prevalent gets absorbed. Regions of the planet
devoid of the clouds and hazes that can reflect this light back to the
camera appear relatively dark. Thus, the bright areas in these images
represent hazes and clouds high in the atmosphere.
Because the range of wavelengths for this filter is narrow, and because
most of this light is absorbed by Saturn, the planet's disk is inherently
faint and the exposures required are rather long. The rings do not
strongly absorb at these wavelengths, and so they reflect more light and
are overexposed compared to the atmosphere.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 6 degrees
below the ringplane. Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) is seen
above the rings at right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept.
25, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 890 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn and
at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Image scale is
132 kilometers (82 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.