October 30, 2009
The Cassini spacecraft captured this natural color view of Saturn almost a month after the planet's August 2009 equinox. The shadow cast on the planet by the rings remains narrow.
Spokes are visible on the B ring. To learn more about these ghostly radial structures, see 'Tis the Season for Spokes.
Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) can be seen in the lower left. Mimas and the rings have been brightened relative to the planet to increase visibility.
The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun's angle to the ringplane, significantly darkens the rings, and causes out-of-plane structures to look anomalously bright and cast shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn's equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. Before and after equinox, Cassini's cameras have spotted not only the predictable shadows of some of Saturn's moons (see Across Resplendent Rings ), but also the shadows of newly revealed vertical structures in the rings themselves (see A Small Find Near Equinox).
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane.
The red, green and blue images that were mosaicked together to create this view were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 4, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 92 degrees. Image scale is 156 kilometers (97 miles) 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.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute