NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this unusual view of the ringed planet on March 16, featuring subdued pastel colors giving gas-giant Saturn a positively romantic appearance.
Shadows of the rings sweep across Saturn’s northern latitudes, while the faint specter of Enceladus, at 505 kilometers (314 miles) across, hugs the ring plane to the right of center.
Mission scientists combined images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters to create this color view, which approximates what the human eye would see.
Cassini took the image with its wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 102 degrees. Image scale is 120 kilometers (75 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
