Shadow of Demarcation

Saturn's rings cast a dramatic shadow separating the blues and greens of the planet's northern hemisphere from the creamy pastels coloring the southern hemisphere.

This mosaic combines 6 images -- 2 each of red, green and blue spectral filters -- to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 30, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Image scale is 67 kilometers (42 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