Me and My Shadow
Saturn's rings cast shadows on the planet, but the shadows appear to be
inside out! The edge of Saturn's outermost A ring can be seen at the top left
corner of the image. Moving towards the bottom of the page, one can see the
faint Cassini Division, the opaque B ring and the innermost C ring, which
contains several ringlets that appear dark against Saturn in this geometry. The
bottom half of the image features the shadows of these rings in reverse order
superposed against the disk of the planet: the C ring, the B ring, the Cassini
Division and the inner half of the A ring.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 28
degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Dec. 2, 2013, using a spectral filter which preferentially
admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 750,000 miles (1.2
million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 57 degrees. Image scale is 45 miles (72 kilometers) per pixel.
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,
The Cassini
imaging team homepage is at
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science
Institute
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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