Limb Scan

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute , Posted on: Friday, 15 August 2008, 07:49 CDT Download full size image

This bizarre scene shows the cloud-streaked limb of Saturn in front of the planet's B ring. The ring's image is warped near the limb by the diffuse gas in Saturn's upper atmosphere.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 31 degrees below the ringplane. North on Saturn is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 24, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 657,000 kilometers (408,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

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