This view of Saturn's outer C ring shows the extreme variations in
brightness, along with the subtle, large-scale wavy variations discovered
24 years ago by NASA's Voyager spacecraft. The notably dark Maxwell gap
(near upper right) contains the bright, narrow and eccentric Maxwell
ringlet, a Saturnian analog of the narrow Uranian epsilon ring. The gap
also contains another very faint ringlet newly discovered by Cassini.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Oct. 29, 2004, at a distance of 838,000 (521,000 miles) from Saturn. The
center of this view shows an area located approximately 81,300 kilometers
(50,500 miles) from the planet. The image scale is 4.6 kilometers (2.9
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.