Faint Spokes

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Caption:

The dark B ring of Saturn is highlighted here by numerous faint spokes. The two most prominent spokes are seen below and to the right of center.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 52 degrees above the ringplane. Saturn's shadow cuts across the rings at lower left. The pixelated appearance of the shadow edge results from the extreme enhancement used to make the spokes more visible.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 6, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 104 kilometers (65 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 .

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