PIA08201: Saturn's Night Lights


Saturn’s Night Lights

Caption:

The dark side of the ringplane glows with scattered light, including the luminous F ring, which shines like a rope of brilliant neon. Below, Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) presents an exquisitely thin crescent.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The image was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 3, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 160 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.

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 Rings Dione, F Ring
System Saturn
Target Type Ring Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Infrared, Visual, Wave
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2006-06-16
Date in Caption 2006-05-03
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08201
Identifier PIA08201