The Cassini spacecraft catches Janus joining other Saturnian moons in the
equinox shadow-casting party.
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.
Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is not visible in this image,
but its shadow stretches across Saturn's A and F rings. Three background
stars are visible in the image.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 21 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 10, 2009. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 965,000 kilometers (600,000 miles) from Saturn
and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. Image scale
is 5 kilometers (3 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.