View of an alien copper-coloured ring world

Cassini, the robotic emissary flying high above Saturn, captured this view of an alien copper-coloured ring world. The overexposed planet has deliberately been removed to show the unlit rings alone, seen from an elevation of 60°, the highest Cassini has yet attained.

The view is a mosaic of 27 images taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on 21 January 2007, over the course of about 45 minutes and at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometres from Saturn. Image scale is 90 kilometres per pixel.

The planet's shadow carves a dark swath across the ring plane at the right. Several moons of Saturn are also visible in this image: Epimetheus (116 kilometres across) at the 1 o'clock position, Pandora (84 kilometres across) at the 5 o'clock position, Janus (181 kilometres across) at the 10 o'clock position.

Bright clumps of material in the narrow F ring moved in their orbits between each of the colour exposures, creating a chromatic misalignment that provides some sense of the continuous motion in the ring system. Radially extending lens-flare artefacts, which result from light being scattered within the camera optics, are present in the view.