The night skies of Saturn are graced by the planet's dazzling rings, but
as this image shows, one's view could be very different depending on the
season and from which hemisphere one gazes up.
This point of view shows that the southern hemisphere is much brighter on
the planet's night side than the northern hemisphere, owing to the
brilliance of sunlight reflecting off the southern illuminated rings. The
northern hemisphere sees only the ghostly glow of the dim scattered light
that manages to penetrate the rings.
The planet's shadow eclipses the rings themselves in the lower half of
this scene, but close inspection shows ringlets in the C ring silhouetted
against the southern latitudes.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on July 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately 952,000
kilometers (592,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 124 degrees. Image scale is 53 kilometers (33 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.
