Click for original image.

Cool image time! Rather than post another Mars image, I decided today to dig back into the Cassini orbiter archives, which orbited Saturn for almost fourteen years, beginning in 2004.

The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 6, 2006 from about 397,000 miles away. It has a resolution of about 22 miles per pixel, so no object smaller than that is resolved.

This wide and sweeping view of the sunlit rings of Saturn takes in the impressive variety in their structure — from the clumpy and perennially intriguing F ring to the many waves, ringlets and gaps in the A and B rings and the Cassini Division in between.

The F ring is the outermost thin clumpy ring. The B ring is the brighter set of rings inside the wide Cassini Division, with the A ring the darker set beyond. For a labeled map of all the rings and gaps go here. The seemingly incoherent naming sequence is because the rings are named alphabetically in their order of discovery. Thus, the A ring was first identified, followed by the inner B Ring. The F ring was discovered by the Pioneer 11 when it flew past Saturn in 1979.

While the many Cassini wide-view images of Saturn’s rings tend to look somewhat the same, they all remain breath-taking regardless. Imagine a hotel in orbit around Saturn, where you could look out your window and see this evolve over time as your spacecraft orbited the ringed planet.