Saturn's shadow cuts sharply across the rings in this remarkable night
side view.
The planet's northern latitudes are in darkness in the upper portion of
this scene, while the southern reaches are bathed in ringshine. On the
left sunlight filters through the rings, and on the right the rings are
blocking the reflected ringshine in the shadow of Saturn. The overexposed,
sunlit crescent at lower left marks the transition from Saturnian day to
night.
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) hovers below center -- a tiny
bauble ornamenting the ringed giant.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on August 19, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.5
million kilometers (1 million miles) from Mimas and 1.7 million kilometers
(1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 92 kilometers (57 miles)
per pixel on Mimas and 103 kilometers (64 miles) on Saturn.
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.
