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Funhouse Atmosphere
PIA 07521
Avg Rating: 9.80/10
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Saturn's atmosphere is essentially transparent at wavelengths visible to the human eye, but when the view through the atmosphere is oblique, as along the planet's limb, it will distort anything seen through it. The refracted image of the rings in this image taken by Cassini of Saturn's night side abruptly terminates where Saturn's high-altitude haze becomes opaque.
The F ring shepherd moon Prometheus (86 kilometers, 53 miles across) hovers below center. Had an image like this been taken a few minutes earlier, the appearance of Prometheus would also have been warped.
Near the left edge of the image, the appearance of the Encke Gap in Saturn's rings is being refracted. As the gap emerges from behind the planet, its image is bent less and less, following the decreasing density profile of the atmosphere with altitude. The appearance of the Cassini Division is warped as well, near the top of this scene. The refraction effect is slightly different in this visible light image from a previously released infrared view (see PIA06656).
The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on April 28, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 12 kilometers (7 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: June 15, 2005 (PIA 07521)
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