Halfway to Southern Winter
The shadows of Saturn's rings edge ever farther southward as Saturn creeps towards southern winter (or northern summer). Saturn is now almost exactly halfway between its equinox (August 2009) and southern winter solstice (in May 2017).
At equinox, the rings' shadows appeared as a thin line at Saturn's equator. See The Rite of Spring.
This view is centered on an area at 22 degrees south latitude on Saturn. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 6, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 813,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 48 miles (78 kilometers) per pixel.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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