A section of Saturn's perturbed F ring displays kinks in its bright
strands. At left, edge waves in the Encke Gap, caused by the
presence of Pan, can be seen, along with two faint ringlets.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from
about 4 degrees above the ringplane.
The rings disappear into the planet's shadow at the top of the scene.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Nov. 14, 2007. The view was acquired
at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of about 55 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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.