CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Southern Face of Saturn

Viewed nearly edge-on, Saturn's rings appear dark and pencil-thin against the backdrop of the planet's swirling clouds.

Notable here are the shadows cast by the rings onto the northern hemisphere, as well as details of the banded atmosphere, such as the bright equatorial region.

The image was taken with the wide angle camera on February 18, 2005, from a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers where gaseous methane absorbs. The image scale is 67 kilometers (42 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: April 4, 2005 (PIA 06619)
Image/Caption Information 		  Southern Face of Saturn
PIA 06619
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