In a splendid portrait created by light and gravity, Saturn's lonely moon
Mimas is seen against the cool, blue-streaked backdrop of Saturn's
northern hemisphere. Delicate shadows cast by the rings arc gracefully
across the planet, fading into darkness on Saturn's night side.
The part of the atmosphere seen here appears darker and more bluish than
the warm brown and gold hues seen in Cassini images of the southern
hemisphere, due to preferential scattering of blue wavelengths by the
cloud-free upper atmosphere.
The bright blue swath near Mimas (398 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is
created by sunlight passing through the Cassini division (4,800
kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide). The rightmost part of this distinctive
feature is slightly overexposed and therefore bright white in this image.
Shadows of several thin ringlets within the division can be seen here as
well. The dark band that stretches across the center of the image is the
shadow of Saturn's B ring, the densest of the main rings. Part of the
actual Cassini division appears at the bottom, along with the A ring and
the narrow, outer F ring. The A ring is transparent enough that, from
this viewing angle, the atmosphere and threadlike shadows cast by the
inner C ring are visible through it.
Images taken with red, green and blue filters were combined to create
this color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow angle camera on Nov. 7, 2004, at a distance of 3.7 million
kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 22
kilometers (14 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.
