Saturn's southern hemisphere shines in the light of a summer morning in
this unusual view from the Cassini spacecraft. The planet's southern
hemisphere is currently tilted toward the Sun (for reference see
PIA05425).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide
angle camera on Oct. 30, 2004, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million
kilometers (870,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 123 degrees. North is rotated about 20 degrees to the
left. The image scale is 82 kilometers (51 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 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.
