The ringed planet Saturn bathes in golden hues in this view taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

Visible here are Saturn’s B and C rings, which shine in diffuse, scattered light as Cassini looked down on the planet’s night side. The southern hemisphere here is lit by sunlight reflected by Saturn’s rings. The planet’s northern hemisphere, however, sports much less illumination from the dim light filtering through the rings.

Some of Saturn’s finer, innermost rings can be spotted in silhouette on the planet’s southern hemisphere before shadows blot them out. The golden hues here are due to the additional scattering of light through the rings brought on by a high phase angle and Cassini’s field of view on the rings’ unlit side.

This is a natural color view of Saturn, but was assembled through several exposures using red, green and blue filters aboard Cassini. The spacecraft took this image on Sept. 28, 2006—though it was released this month—while flying some 900,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) from the planet.

The Cassini mission is the result of cooperation between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

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-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute