CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Filtering the Sun

Janus coasts past as Cassini takes in a view of the unilluminated side of the rings. The rings are backlit here--they shine by scattered sunlight filtering through.

This view looks toward the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane. The dark B ring lies at center, flanked by the much brighter C and A rings. The thin line of the F ring encompasses the rest. Janus is 179 kilometers (111 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 1, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 581,000 kilometers (361,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees at the center of this view. Image scale is 28 kilometers (17 miles) per pixel on Janus.

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: November 14, 2007 (PIA 09771)
Image/Caption Information 		  Filtering the Sun
PIA 09771
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