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Structure in the Shadows

March 28, 2006
Shadows drape Saturn's northern hemisphere, providing a different kind of look at prominent features in the rings. This image was taken with NASA's Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2006.

Shadows drape Saturn's northern hemisphere, providing a different kind of look at prominent features in the rings. From the lower left corner upward, the visible features are: the shadow of the outer B ring, followed by the wide, bright Cassini Division, then the A ring with the embedded thin, bright Encke Gap and finally the dark, narrow F ring.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers, and at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 16 kilometers (10 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

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.

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