This natural color view from the Cassini spacecraft highlights the myriad
gradations in the transparency of Saturn's inner rings.
The dark shadows of the rings separate Saturn's southern hemisphere in the
bottom of the image from the north. The innermost D ring is invisible,
laid over the planet's northern hemisphere. The translucent C ring runs
through the middle of the image. The denser B ring stretches across the
top of the image.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 48 degrees
below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral
filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were
acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 28, 2009 at
a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (620,000 miles) from
Saturn. Image scale is 59 kilometers (37 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.