Bright spokes emerge from behind the shadow of the planet and into
sunlight in this view from the Cassini spacecraft.
Saturn's long shadow covers the left side of the image. This view looks
toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 22 degrees below the
ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Feb. 26, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 821,000 kilometers (510,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 150 degrees. Image scale is 46
kilometers (29 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.
