Shadows on a Giant
Saturn's rings cast wide shadows on the planet, and the shadow of a moon also graces the gas giant in this scene from the Cassini spacecraft.
The moon Enceladus is not shown in this view, but it does cast a small, elongated shadow on the planet near the bottom of this view. The moon Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) is visible as a bright dot on the far right of the image in the ring plane.
This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees below the ringplane.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 14, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.7 million miles (2.8 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. Image scale is 105 miles (170 kilometers) per pixel.
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