With its dazzling rings, Saturn radiates a beauty and splendor like no
other known world. Here, Cassini has captured the cool crescent of Saturn
from above the ringplane, with the planet's shadow cutting neatly across
the many lanes of ice.
Saturn's southern hemisphere is lit on the night side by reflected light
from the rings. The rings cast shadows onto the northern daylit hemisphere
at the left, and can be seen in silhouette against the faintly illuminated
`dark side' of the planet at the right.
Light reflected inside the camera has left a generally streak-like pattern
across the raw images used for this color composite. This pattern appears
as multicolor fringes in the final product, but is greatly minimized
because of the image processing techniques.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 31, 2006, at a distance of
approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn and
at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 163 degrees. Image scale is
153 kilometers (95 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.
