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The "Opposition Effect" (again)
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The Opposition Effect, a brightness surge that is visible on Saturn's Rings when the Sun is directly behind the Spacecraft, is captured here as a colorful halo of light moving across Saturn's Sunlit Rings. The rainbow of color seen here is actually an artifact and a by-product of the spot's movement and the way the color image was produced. Cassini acquires color images by taking sequential exposures using red, green and blue spectral filters, which are then composited together to form a color view. The bright patch traveled across the Rings between exposures taken for this view, creating a series of 3 colorful spots showing its position at 3 separate moments.
This view looks toward the Sunlit side of the Rings from about 9° below the Ring-Plane.
The images in this view were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 12, 2007, at a distance of approx. 523.000 Km (such as about 325.000 miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is roughly 31 Km (about 19 miles) per pixel.
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