Shrinking Shadow

The rings cast a dramatic but narrow shadow on the planet in this view on the sunlit side of the rings from just one degree below the ringplane.

The rings' shadows have grown narrower on the globe of the planet as it approaches its August 2009 equinox, when the sun will be aligned with the planet's equator.

Three large storms spin through the atmosphere of the southern hemisphere, but many smaller storms and fine details can be seen as well.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 31, 2008 using a combination of polarized and near-infrared filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (754,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 68 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