CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Arc and Crescent

Crescent Saturn is girded by its dark belt of ice in this marvelous portrait of the planet and the "dark" side of its rings. This is the unlit side of the rings, where sunlight filters feebly through the lanes of particles.

This view is a mosaic of two images. No data were taken to fill in the missing block in the upper left quadrant, and the inner part of the rings is cut off there.

This view was acquired from about 4 degrees above the ringplane.

The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers on Nov. 6, 2006. Cassini was then at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 148 degrees. Image scale is 77 kilometers (48 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 InstituteNASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: December 8, 2006 (PIA 08832)
Image/Caption Information 		  Arc and Crescent
PIA 08832
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