Faint features in Saturn's innermost ring, the D ring, are brought into
view in this strongly contrast-enhanced Cassini image. A few background
stars are visible through the sheer ring as squiggly star trails.
The inner region of the C ring is seen at upper left. The faint diagonal
wedge shape on the left side of the image was caused by stray light in the
camera optics.
The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 18 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 12, 2007 at a distance of approximately
238,000 kilometers (148,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 1 kilometer
(0.6 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.