Jagged looking shadows stretch away from vertical structures of ring
material created by the moon Daphnis in this image taken as Saturn
approaches its August 2009 equinox.
Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is a bright dot casting a thin
shadow just to the left of the center of the image. The moon has an
inclined orbit, and its gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the
particles of the A ring forming the Keeler Gap's edge and sculpting the
edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and out-of-plane
components. See PIA11655 to learn more and to see a movie of this process.
The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun's
angle to the ringplane and causes out-of-plane structures to cast long
shadows across 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.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 43
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 26, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 823,000 kilometers (511,000 miles)
from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53
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.