Saturn’s rings are graced by the presence of distant Titan, its northern hemisphere bathed in the radiant sunlight of late spring. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
NASA reveals another image of Titan and Saturn.
Distant Titan, its northern hemisphere drenched in the sunlight of late spring, hangs above Saturn’s rings. What might at first glance look like a gap between the rings and the planet is actually Saturn’s shadow. During most of Saturn’s long year, the projection of the planet’s shadow extends well beyond the edge of the A ring. But, with summer solstice fast approaching, the Sun is now higher in Saturn’s sky and most of Saturn’s A ring is completely shadow-free.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in red light with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on January 26, 2016.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 84 degrees. The image scale on Titan is 109 miles (176 kilometers) per pixel.
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