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IMAGE: Shadows on Saturn's rings
4 Jul 2009
The shadow of Saturn's moon Mimas dips onto the planet's rings and straddles the Cassini Division in this natural colour image taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
The novel sunlight illumination angles created as the Saturnian system approaches its August 2009 equinox enables moons orbiting in or near the plane of Saturn's equatorial rings to cast shadows onto 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, when the sunlight angle is very low compared to the plane of the rings.
Mimas (396 kilometres wide) does not appear in this image, but the moon has a flattened, or oblate, shape.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 52 degrees below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create the natural colour view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 8, 2009 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometres from Saturn, giving an image scale of 64 kilometres per pixel.
Adapted from information issued by NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute.
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