The Cassini spacecraft gazes down through the dark side of Saturn's rings
toward the softly glowing planet. The night side southern hemisphere is
lit by sunlight reflecting off the opposite side of the rings. The
planet's shadow slices diagonally across the scene.
This view was acquired from about 23 degrees above the ringplane. The
sliver of Saturn's sunlit crescent is partly overexposed as seen through
the Cassini Division, a region where there is less material to block or
scatter incoming light.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 11, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 151 degrees. Image scale is
about 60 kilometers (37 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.
