Long Day's Journey into Night
Saturn's shadow cuts sharply across its rings as the orbits of ring particles carry them suddenly from day to night. With no atmosphere to scatter light, shadows in space are much darker than we're used to here on Earth.
The ghostly, transient features known as `spokes' can be faintly seen in Saturn's B ring. More on spokes can be found at 'Tis the Season for Spokes and The Spoke Search.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 47 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 5, 2013.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 891,000 miles (1.434 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 85 degrees. Image scale is 51 miles (82 kilometers) per pixel.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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