CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
True Colors

Saturn's dark-side rings glow in shades of brown and gold, contrasting with the more neutral appearance of the icy moon Tethys.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across). North is up and rotated 35 degrees to the right.

The view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees above the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The view was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2007, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 12 kilometers (8 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: December 7, 2007 (PIA 09788)
Image/Caption Information 		  True Colors
PIA 09788
Avg Rating: 9.06/10

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Alliance Member Comments
Red_dragon (Dec 8, 2007 at 12:39 PM):
Superb. The best of the image is the nice contrast between gold, brown, and black of the rings. Bravo again for CICLOPS.