The dark shadows that drape Saturn's northern latitudes are split by three
familiar bright gaps. From bottom to top, sunlight passes through the
broad Cassini Division (4,800 kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide), the Encke
gap (325 kilometers, or 200 miles wide) and (barely visible) the Keeler
gap (42 kilometers, or 26 miles wide).
It is unlikely that the shadows cast by Saturn's rings have much of an
effect on the large-scale movements of the atmosphere. The dynamic clouds
of this gas giant are driven by processes going on much deeper inside the
planet, where sunlight does not penetrate.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The image was acquired with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 28, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 377,000 kilometers (234,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 19 kilometers (12 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.
