Cassini pierced Saturn's ring plane on Dec. 14, 2004, and swiped this
sidelong glance at the planet and its magnificent rings. Saturn's tilt
relative to the Sun throws dramatic shadows of the rings onto the planet's
northern hemisphere. Details in Saturn's swirling atmosphere are also
visible here.
This view looks down onto the dark side of the rings. The rings are lit
from below, and both dense and empty regions appear dark, while regions
of intermediate particle density are bright.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera at a
distance of approximately 654,000 kilometers (406,000 miles) from Saturn
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at
728 nanometers. The image scale is 35 kilometers (22 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 Science Mission
Directorate, 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.