Large regions of Saturn's night side are illuminated by the planet's
gleaming rings. Except for a sliver of the sunlit crescent at left, this
view shows a part of the planet lit almost entirely by ringshine.
The southern hemisphere, at bottom, receives its illumination from
sunlight that strikes the rings' southern face and is reflected onto the
planet. The northern hemisphere, at top, is lit by the feeble light that
wends its way through countless ring particles to emerge on the rings'
north face.
Despite the dim lighting on the northern part of the planet, many cloud
features can be seen there nevertheless.
This view was acquired from about 44 degrees above the ringplane. At
bottom, the planet's shadow stretches across the D and C rings.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 23, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 901,000 kilometers (560,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 50 kilometers (31 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
