Shadowy Veil

Saturn's southern hemisphere is glimpsed through the gossamer veil of its rings. Ring shadows adorn the low northern latitudes.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 22 degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 16, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (908,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 84 kilometers (52 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