Cassini spies a "fan" in Saturn's tenuous F ring. This fan-like structure appears as dark lines spreading outward from the left of the bright clump of ring material near the center of the image. See PIA12784 and PIA12786 to learn more about fans. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane. Several background stars are visible, including two that can be seen through the ring. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 1, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 119 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

PIA 12710 Avg Rating: 8.68/10

Full Size 540x1016: JPEG 29 KB PNG 88 KB TIFF 142 KB