Working With Saturn

HT to :: the
Core 4 :: for the link to the newest href="http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08362">picture
of Saturn.
 The complete image file is over 35MB.  You would
need a  4088x2908 monitor to see the whole thing at full
resolution.

This is one where you have to use your imagination.

Original Caption Released with Image:

Surely one of the most gorgeous sights the solar system
has to offer, Saturn sits enveloped by the full splendor of its stately
rings.

Taking in the rings in their entirety was the focus of this particular
imaging sequence. Therefore, the camera exposure times were just right
to capture the dark-side of its rings, but longer than that required to
properly expose the globe of sunlit Saturn. Consequently, the sunlit
half of the planet is overexposed.

Between the blinding light of day and the dark of night, there is a
strip of twilight on the globe where colorful details in the atmosphere
can be seen. Bright clouds dot the bluish-grey northern polar region
here. In the south, the planet's night side glows golden in reflected
light from the rings' sunlit face.

Saturn's shadow stretches completely across the rings in this view,
taken on Jan. 19, 2007, in contrast to what Cassini saw when it arrived
in 2004 (see href="http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05429">PIA05429).

The view is a mosaic of 36 images -- that is, 12 separate sets of red,
green and blue images -- taken over the course of about 2.5 hours, as
Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 40
degrees above the ring plane.

The images in this natural-color view were obtained with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.23
million kilometers (764,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 70
kilometers (44 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.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit href="http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov">http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute