Cassini pierced the ring plane and rounded Saturn on Oct. 27, 2004,
capturing this view of the dark portion of the rings. A portion of the
planet's atmosphere is visible here, as is its shadow on the surface of
the rings.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera on Oct.
27, 2004, at a distance of about 618,000 kilometers (384,000 miles) from
Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 1001 nanometers. The image scale is 33 kilometers (21 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 Office of Space
Science, 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.