Saturn's B and C rings shine in diffuse, scattered light as the Cassini
spacecraft looks on the planet's night side. The southern hemisphere is
lit by sunlight reflecting off the rings, while the north shines much more
feebly in the dim light that filters through the rings and is scattered on
the northern hemisphere.
The fine, innermost rings are seen silhouetted against the southern
hemisphere of the planet before partially disappearing into shadow.
The color of the rings appears more golden because of the increased
scattering in the rings brought about by the high phase angle and the view
being toward rings' the unlit side. Saturn also looks more golden because
of the high phase angle here.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were obtained by the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 28, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 151 degrees. Image scale is 83
kilometers (51 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.