CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Saturn Hides the Rings

Saturn's B and C rings disappear behind the immense planet. Where they meet the limb, the rings appear to bend slightly owing to upper-atmospheric refraction.

Crenulations in the planet's clouds denote the locations of turbulent belt/zone boundaries.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 16, 2006 at a distance of approximately 256,000 kilometers (159,000 miles) from Saturn. 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: September 12, 2006 (PIA 08265)
Image/Caption Information 		  Saturn Hides the Rings
PIA 08265
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