Spokes at Sunrise

Bright spokes emerge from behind the shadow of the planet and into sunlight in this view from the Cassini spacecraft.

Saturn's long shadow covers the left side of the image. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 22 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 26, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 821,000 kilometers (510,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 150 degrees. Image scale is 46 kilometers (29 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