Perfect Dark

Streaks of cloud are overlain with graceful ring shadows in this view of Saturn's northern latitudes.

Structure is visible in the shadow of the A ring and Cassini Division, which widen at the highest latitudes, near lower right. The lower left half of the image does not show the blackness of space, but rather the shadow of the B ring, which is perfectly dark here.

The image was acquired from a high inclination above the planet's ring plane and looks obliquely toward the limb. (The region shown would be downward and to the left of the view presented in On High.)

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers on Oct. 30, 2006. Cassini was then at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 142 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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