PIA18320: A Stage for Shadows


A Stage for Shadows

Caption:

Two kinds of dramatic shadows play across the face of Saturn in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft from Dec. 6, 2007. The planet's rings cast dark bands across the cloud tops in the northern hemisphere. Near the pole, an elongated shadow can be seen from Saturn's moon Tethys, which appears as a bright sphere left of center.

Other icy moons make an appearance as well, including Dione (front right) and Enceladus (back right). A bright storm can be seen in Saturn's southern hemisphere at lower right.

This natural color view is a mosaic of images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1 million miles (about 1.7 million kilometers) from Saturn.

Background Info:

The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on Sept. 15, 2017

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and https://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at https://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Dione, Enceladus, Tethys
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 Atmosphere, Color, Shadow, Storm, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2018-05-14
Date in Caption 2007-12-06
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA18320
Identifier PIA18320