Cassini takes in a wide-angle view of majestic, golden-hued Saturn ...
home to our robotic spacecraft for two years now. The ringplane cuts
across the center of Saturn's crescent which wears shadows cast by the
icy rings.
The planet's now familiar blue and pink hues generally are more subtle in
high-phase views from the Cassini wide-angle camera. "Phase" refers to the
angle formed between the Sun, the planet and the spacecraft.
The view is a composite of two sets of color images taken using red, green
and blue spectral filters. The images were combined to create a color view
that approximates the scene as it might appear to human eyes.
The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May
24, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (824,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 139
degrees. Image scale is 76 kilometers (47 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.
