CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
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Streaks of cloud are overlain with graceful ring shadows in this view of Saturn's northern latitudes.

Structure is visible in the shadow of the A ring and Cassini Division which widen at the highest latitudes, near lower right. The lower left half of the image does not show the blackness space, but rather, the shadow of the B ring, which is perfectly dark here.

The image was acquired from a high inclination above the planet's ring plane and looks obliquely toward the limb. (The region shown would be downward and to the left of the view presented in PIA08822.)

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers on Oct. 30, 2006. Cassini was then at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 142 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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 11, 2006 (PIA 08833)
Image/Caption Information 		  Perfect Dark
PIA 08833
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