Darkside Lights

Two small portions of Saturn's F ring shine brilliantly in scattered sunlight as Rhea floats in the distance beyond.

Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 20, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 915,000 kilometers (569,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 151 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute