As Saturn's equinox continues to approach, the moon Pan casts a slightly
longer shadow on the A ring.
See PIA11652 to see an earlier image of a shorter shadow cast by Pan (28
kilometers, or 17 miles across). The novel illumination geometry created
as Saturn approaches its August 2009 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. To
learn more about this special time and to see movies of moons' shadows
moving across the rings, see PIA11651 and PIA11660.
Three stars are visible through the rings.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 51
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 28, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000
miles) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 80 degrees.
Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.