Saturn's moon Tethys casts a wide shadow over the planet's F and A rings.
Tethys itself is not visible in this image. As Saturn approaches its
August 2009 equinox, the planet's moons cast shadows onto the rings. To
learn more about this special time and to see a movie of a moon's shadow
moving across the rings, see PIA11651.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 36 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 21, 2009. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from
Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 142 degrees.
Image scale is 63 kilometers (39 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.