Looking Up

The Cassini spacecraft gazes upward at the face of giant Saturn, seeing beyond the equator to where ring shadows fall across the bluish northern latitudes.

This extreme southern view looks northward from about 58 degrees below the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 1, 2007 at a distance of approximately 940,000 kilometers (584,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 106 kilometers (66 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 http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute