Sunlight filters through Saturn's rings in sepia tones in this artful view
from the Cassini spacecraft of the dark side of the rings. Those rays from
the sun directly reflected from the lit side of the rings onto the planet
strike and illuminate the night-side southern hemisphere.
The densely populated B ring blocks much of the Sun's light and thus looks
quite dark.
Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is a mere sliver below
left.
Unprocessed wide-angle camera images taken in a high-phase viewing
geometry generally contain stray light artifacts. These have largely been
removed from this image by computer image processing.
Cassini was about 3 degrees above the ringplane when this image was
obtained on Sept. 6, 2006. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral
filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were
taken using the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of
approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and
at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 154 degrees. Image scale is
106 kilometers (66 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.
