Figure: Blinding Saturn
Surely one of the most gorgeous sights the Solar System has to offer, Saturn sits enveloped by the full splendor of its stately rings.
This image of Saturn could not have been taken from Earth: no Earth based picture could possibly view the night side of Saturn and the corresponding shadow cast across Saturn's rings. Since Earth is much closer to the Sun than Saturn, only the day side of the planet is visible from the Earth.
Taking in the rings in their entirety was the focus of this particular imaging sequence for the Cassini spacecraft. Therefore, the camera exposure times were just right to capture the dark-side of its rings but longer than that required to properly expose the globe of sunlit Saturn. Consequently, the sunlit half of the planet is overexposed.
Between the blinding light of day and the dark of night, there is a strip of twilight on the globe where colorful details in the atmosphere can be seen. Bright clouds dot the bluish-grey northern polar region here. In the south, the planet's night side glows golden in reflected light from the rings' sunlit face.
Saturn's shadow stretches completely across the rings at this time, in contrast to what Cassini saw when it arrived in 2004.
The view is a mosaic of 36 images -- that is, 12 separate sets of red, green and blue images -- taken over the course of about 2.5 hours, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system.
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 40 degrees above the ringplane.
The images in this natural color view were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.23 million kilometers from Saturn. Image scale is 70 kilometers per pixel.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=2588
Source image and caption for "Rings with Saturn removed": http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=2508
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute