This view of the ringed planet shows its tilt relative to the plane of its
orbit around the Sun. The planet tilts nearly 27 degrees relative to the
ecliptic plane, giving rise to seasons in which the rings shadow each
hemisphere in its respective winter.
Most of the planetary bodies in the Solar System orbit near the plane of
the ecliptic, since they formed along with the Sun from a spinning disk of
gas and dust.
The high phase angle -- the Sun-Saturn-spacecraft viewing angle, which is
116 degrees here -- brings out cloud structure quite nicely.
The image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 11, 2006, at a distance of
approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. The
image scale is 165 kilometers (103 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.