On the Border

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Caption:

The sharp change in brightness that runs diagonally across the center of this image represents the boundary between Saturn's C and B rings.

This location sits at about 92,000 kilometers (57,200 miles) from Saturn.

The B ring (at lower left) appears darker than the C ring from this perspective, above the unilluminated side of the rings, because the more densely populated B ring strongly attenuates sunlight passing through it.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 7, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (888,000 miles) from Saturn, and from about 32 degrees above the ringplane. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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