Click on the image for movie
Mimas' shadow traverses the sunlit side of Saturn's rings in this movie
and mosaic showcasing the unusual sights seen at Saturn as the planet
approaches its August 2009 equinox.
The novel illumination geometry created as the Saturnian system approaches
equinox allows moons orbiting in or near the plane of Saturn's equatorial
rings to cast shadows onto the rings. These scenes are possible only
during the few months before and after Saturn's equinox which occurs only
once in about 15 Earth years.
Twenty images, each taken 3 minutes and 36 seconds apart, were combined to
create this mosaic and movie. Contiguous images were stitched together to
create the mosaic showing the whole swath of the rings across which the
moon's shadow passed.
At the beginning of the movie, the shadow starts on the bright B ring. It
crosses the darker Cassini Division and then moves to the A ring. At the
end of the movie, the edge of the shadow just catches the edge of the A
ring next to blackness of the Roche Division separating the A ring from
the thin F ring.
These images have been processed, and background stars have been removed.
To see a movie and mosaic of Mimas' shadow moving across the unlit side of
the rings, see PIA11660.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 32 degrees
below the ringplane. The images were taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 9, 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 55
degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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.