The Encke and Keeler gaps are visible in this image of the outer A ring.
Brightness variations are clearly visible in the Encke ringlet.
A density wave can be seen exterior to (to the left of) the Encke gap, and
the region exterior to (to the left of) the Keeler gap is considerably
brighter than the rest of the ring.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 23, 2008 at a distance of approximately
721,000 kilometers (448,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 58 degrees. Image scale is 4
kilometers (2 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.
