Scattered Sunlight

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Caption:

Sunlight scatters through Saturn's rings, emerging on the unilluminated side. Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across, lower right) and Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across, upper left) are visible here, respectively internal and external to the narrow F ring.

This view looks toward the rings from about 17 degrees above the ringplane. The planet's shadow darkens the rings near upper left.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 20, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 103 kilometers (64 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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