Out of the Shadow

A large group of spokes emerges from Saturn's shadow in this image taken of the morning side of the rings. Such groupings may hold clues to the manner in which these features are formed.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 2, 2008 at a distance of approximately 869,000 kilometers (540,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Image scale is 48 kilometers (30 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