PIA05424: Light and Shadow
 Target Name:  Saturn
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  988 x 944 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  CICLOPS/Space Science Institute
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA05424.tif (378.1 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA05424.jpg (36.9 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

The dark shadow of Saturn's southern hemisphere spreads across the planet's rings all the way to the Encke gap. Close inspection of the shadow's left-most extension reveals the penumbra, the blurry region in which ring features are only partially illuminated. A viewer within the penumbra would see the Sun partially eclipsed by Saturn.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on June 21, 2004, from a distance of 6.3 million kilometers (3.9 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to visible green light. The image scale is 37 kilometers (23 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras, were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2004-07-30