The shadow of the moon Tethys stretches across Saturn's A ring before
fading into the B ring as the shadow extends towards the lower right of
this image.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 27
degrees above the ringplane. The shadow appears truncated by the dense B
ring. Tethys (1062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) is not shown.
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
an earlier movie of a moon's shadow moving across the rings, see PIA11651.
To watch a movie of Tethys's shadow seen from a similar viewing geometry,
see PIA11659.
This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on May 20, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 128 degrees. Image scale is 82
kilometers (51 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.