The thin shadow of the moon Pandora cuts across Saturn's narrow F ring.
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.
Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) is on the left of the image.
Other bright points of light in the image are background stars.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 55
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 16, 2009. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 98
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.