Saturn's B and C rings disappear behind the immense planet. Where they
meet the limb, the rings appear to bend slightly owing to
upper-atmospheric refraction.
Crenulations --irregularly wavy or serrated features -- in the planet's
clouds denote the locations of turbulent belt/zone boundaries.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was obtained with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 16, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 256,000 kilometers (159,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 12 kilometers (7 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.