Shadows Side by Side

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute , Posted on: Sunday, 8 November 2009, 07:07 CST Download full size image

A pair of moon shadows and a series of spokes adorn this ring image taken about a month after Saturn's August 2009 equinox.

The shadow of the moon Janus stretches across the middle of the image. The shadow of the moon Mimas runs across the bottom, appearing to undulate as it traverses vertical structures within the rings. Very faint, bright spokes are barely detectable just above Janus' shadow near the center of the image. To learn more about spokes, see 'Tis the Season for Spokes.

The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun's angle to the ringplane, significantly darkens the rings, and causes out-of-plane structures to look anomalously bright and cast shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn's equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. Before and after equinox, Cassini's cameras have spotted not only the predictable shadows of some of Saturn's moons (see Across Resplendent Rings), but also the shadows of newly revealed vertical structures in the rings themselves (see A Small Find Near Equinox).

This view looks toward the sunlit, northern side of the rings from about 8 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 8, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 104 degrees. Image scale is 17 kilometers (11 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.

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