In a dazzling and dramatic portrait painted by the Sun, the long thin
shadows of Saturn's rings sweep across the planet's northern latitudes.
Within the shadows, bright bands represent areas where the ring material
is less dense, while dark strips and wave patterns reveal areas of denser
material.
The shadow darkens sharply near upper right, corresponding to the
boundary of the thin C ring with the denser B ring. A wide-field, natural
color view of these shadows can be seen in PIA06164.
The globe of Saturn's moon Mimas (398 kilometers, or 247 miles across)
has wandered into view near the bottom of the frame. A few of the large
craters on this small moon are visible.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Jan. 18, 2005, at a distance of 1.4 million kilometers (889,000 miles)
from Saturn using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 752 nanometers. The image scale is 9 kilometers (5.5 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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For images visit the Cassini imaging team home page
http://ciclops.org.
