Saturn's rings sweep around the planet, throwing their dark shadows onto
the northern hemisphere.
The equatorial region is generally brighter than the rest of the planet in
Cassini spacecraft views, but the contrast is often striking in monochrome
views like this, taken in the infrared part of the spectrum at wavelengths
sensitive to methane absorption in the planet's atmosphere. (Compare, for
example, PIA08392 and PIA07669.)
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 24
degrees above the ringplane.
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.
