Shadows on Saturn

Saturn's moon Mimas casts a elliptical shadow on the planet south of the larger, wider shadows cast by the planet's rings.

Mimas and the rings are not shown here. This view looks toward the southern hemisphere of the planet.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 8, 2010 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 82 degrees. Image scale is 13 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 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.