Thin Line, Broad Shadows

Saturn's rings appear as only a thin line seen edge-on in the middle of this Cassini view, but the rings cast broad shadows on the southern hemisphere of the planet in the lower left of the image.

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from just below the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 9, 2011 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 796,000 kilometers (494,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 147 degrees. Image scale is 44 kilometers (27 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute