Two dark spots drift across the northern skies of Saturn. The shadows are
cast by the moons Tethys and Mimas.
Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) orbits farther from Saturn
than Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) and casts the larger of
the two shadows here.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 46
degrees above the ringplane.The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 30, 2008. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (720,000
miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 66 kilometers (41 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.