The dark shadow of Saturn’s southern hemisphere spreads across the
planet's rings all the way to the Encke gap. Close inspection of the shadow's
left-most extension reveals the penumbra, the blurry region in which ring
features are only partially illuminated. A viewer within the penumbra would
see the Sun partially eclipsed by Saturn.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
June 21, 2004, from a distance of 6.3 million kilometers (3.9 million miles)
from Saturn through a filter sensitive to visible green light. The image scale
is 37 kilometers (23 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.