The soft, sweeping shadows of Saturn's C ring cover bright patches of
clouds in the planet's atmosphere. The shadow-throwing rings stretch
across the view at bottom. The dark inner edge of the B ring is visible
at top.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The image was acquired with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 28, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 340,000 kilometers (211,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 17 kilometers (10 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.
