Rays of light from the sun have taken many different paths to compose this
glorious image of Saturn and its rings.
This view looks toward the unilluminated (north) side of the rings and, at
the top of the image, the night side of Saturn. Sunlight has been
reflected off the illuminated side of the rings to light the planet's
southern hemisphere, seen here as a bright band of yellow-orange. The
northern hemisphere, in the top left corner of the image, is dimly lit by
light diffusely scattered through the rings. The planet's shadow cuts
across the rings, but light reflected off the southern hemisphere
backlights parts of the C ring, making them visible in silhouette. A
similar lighting arrangement can be seen in PIA10476.
Bright points of light in the image are stars occulted by the rings.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 41
degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue
spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The
images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on
March 20, 2009 at a distance of approximately 892,000 kilometers (554,000
miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 50 kilometers (31 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.