The Cassini spacecraft looks close at Saturn to frame a view encompassing
the entire C ring. In the dark region closer to the planet lies the much
dimmer D ring. The bright B ring wraps around the left side of the scene,
while Saturn's shadow darkens the rings at bottom. For reference,
Saturn’s ring sequence from its surface outwards is D, C, B, A, F, G then E.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 4, 2005, at a distance of approximately
627,000 kilometers (390,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 34
kilometers (21 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.