In Saturn's Shadow

Filed under best of, pretty pictures, global views, pics of Earth by planetary missions, Saturn, Saturn's rings, Cassini

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With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the Sun's blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute

This panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on September 15, 2006. The

full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color. Cassini was approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn when the images in this mosaic were taken. Image scale on Saturn is about 260 kilometers (162 miles) per pixel.