Shadow Strands

The soft, sweeping shadows of Saturn's C ring cover bright patches of clouds in the planet's atmosphere. The shadow-throwing rings stretch across the view at bottom. The dark inner edge of the B ring is visible at top.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The image was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 28, 2006 at a distance of approximately 340,000 kilometers (211,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 17 kilometers (10 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