Stately Saturn sits surrounded by its darkened disk of ice. An increasing
range of hues has become visible in the northern hemisphere as spring
approaches and the ring shadows slide southward.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 17
degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue
spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The
images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on
April 15, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers
(906,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 84 kilometers (52 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.