The Cassini spacecraft samples a bit of Saturn's southern hemisphere along with a spread of the planet's main rings.

Working outward from the planet, the C, B, and A rings are visible in this natural color image. The rings have been brightened relative to the planet to enhance their visibility.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 59 degrees below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 23, 2009 at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 58 kilometers (36 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.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.