Shadowcaster

Cassini takes in a sweeping view of Saturn's south polar region as the planet's shadow masks the rings and bright, icy Mimas looks on from left.
This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 28 degrees below the ring plane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color view. The view was acquired with the wide-angle camera on Feb. 20, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (600,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 58 kilometers (36 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