Gazing down on Saturn's rings

Cassini-Huygens pierced Saturn's ring plane and rounded the planet on 27 October 2004, capturing this view of the dark portion of the rings.

The image was taken with the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft wide- angle camera, at a distance of about 618 000 kilometres from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centred at 1001 nanometres. The image scale is 33 kilometres per pixel.