Colorful Saturn tilts its darkened ringplane toward Cassini. Against the
dark sky, the rings are made visible by the light that scatters through
them toward the camera.
The F ring shepherd moon Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) is
faintly visible at the top, left of center. Pandora's brightness was
increased by a factor of three to aid its visibility.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 18
degrees above the ringplane. The planet is visible through the innermost
and outermost portions of the rings.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were obtained by the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 13, 2007, at a distance of
approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 108 kilometers (67 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.
