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Stretched Shadow

March 5, 2010
The shadow of Saturn's moon Dione, cast onto the planet, is elongated in dramatic fashion in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The moon itself does not appear here, but the shadow can be seen south of the ringplane.

The shadow of Saturn's moon Dione, cast onto the planet, is elongated in dramatic fashion.

The moon itself does not appear here, but the shadow can be seen south of the ringplane. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 14, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 118 degrees. Image scale is 140 kilometers (87 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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