Faint, ghostly spokes dapple the dark side of Saturn's A ring as the
planet's shadow makes a sharp diagonal cut across this image from the
Cassini spacecraft.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on April 30, 2008. This view looks toward the
unilluminated side of the rings from about 26 degrees above the ringplane.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 316,000 kilometers
(196,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 147 degrees. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 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.
