Bright spokes grace Saturn's B ring in this Cassini image.
To learn more about the ghostly radial markings called spokes, see PIA11144
and PIA08288. Spokes appear bright when they are viewed at phase,
or Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, angles higher than about 45 degrees. The phase
angle in this image is 61 degrees.
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) orbits between the A ring
and the thin F ring. Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across)
orbits beyond the F ring in the top left of the image. The bright dot in
the top right is a star.
Scale in the original image was 71 kilometers (44 miles) per pixel. The
image has been magnified by a factor of 1.5 and contrast-enhanced to aid
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about
12 degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Saturn and at
a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees.
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.