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Bright Strands

Dec. 25, 2007
A section of Saturn's perturbed F ring displays kinks in its bright strands. At left, edge waves in the Encke Gap, caused by the presence of Pan is seen, along with two faint ringlets. This image was captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Nov. 14, 2007.

A section of Saturn's perturbed F ring displays kinks in its bright strands. At left, edge waves in the Encke Gap, caused by the presence of Pan, can be seen, along with two faint ringlets.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 4 degrees above the ringplane.

The rings disappear into the planet's shadow at the top of the scene.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 14, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 55 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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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