PIA08166: Saturn's Subtle Spectrum


Saturn’s Subtle Spectrum

Caption:

Dreamy colors ranging from pale rose to butterscotch to sapphire give this utterly inhospitable gas planet a romantic appeal. Shadows of the rings caress the northern latitudes whose blue color is presumed to be a seasonal effect.

Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) hugs the ringplane right of center.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color view, which approximates what the human eye would see. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 16, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 102 degrees. Image scale is 120 kilometers (75 miles) per pixel on Saturn.

Background Info:

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Enceladus
System Saturn
Target Type Planet Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Color, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2006-04-27
Date in Caption 2006-03-16
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08166
Identifier PIA08166