The brilliant supergiant star, Rigel, emerges from behind the haze of
Saturn's upper atmosphere in this Cassini view.
Rigel is one of the 10 brightest stars in Earth's sky and forms the
left foot (sometimes referred to as the left knee) of the familiar
constellation Orion.
Imaging scientists use views like these to probe the vertical structure
of haze in Saturn's upper atmosphere. The dimming of the star at each
altitude in the atmosphere yields information on the density of the haze
at that location.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 28, 2006 at a distance of approximately
663,000 kilometers (412,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 4
kilometers (2 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.
