The shadow of the moon Tethys is revealed on Saturn's B and C rings in
this image which also includes the planet.
The planet is overexposed in this image in which the exposure time was set
to capture the faint shadow on the 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 unilluminated side of the rings from about 20
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 12, 2009. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28
degrees. Image scale is 65 kilometers (40 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.