Saturn's northern hemisphere is seen here against its nested rings.
This view from the Cassini spacecraft looks toward the unilluminated side
of the rings from about 30 degrees above the ringplane. The rings have
been brightened relative to the planet to enhance visibility.
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 Feb. 24, 2009 at a distance of
approximately 866,000 kilometers (538,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 38 kilometers (24 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.
