A Shadow's Traverse

Caption NASA:"Mimas' shadow traverses the sunlit side of Saturn's Rings in this mosaic showcasing the unusual sights seen at Saturn as the Planet approaches its August 2009 Equinox.
The novel illumination geometry created as the Saturnian System approaches Equinox allows moons orbiting in or near the plane of Saturn's Equatorial Rings to cast shadows onto the Rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn's Equinox which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years.
Twenty images, each taken 3' and 36" apart, were combined to create this mosaic. Contiguous images were stitched together to create the mosaic showing the whole swath of the Rings across which the moon's shadow passed.

At the beginning of the sequence, the shadow starts on the bright B-Ring. It crosses the darker Cassini Division and then moves to the A-Ring. At the end, the edge of the shadow just catches the edge of the A-Ring, next to blackness of the Roche Division separating the A-Ring from the thin F-Ring.
These images have been processed, and background stars have been removed. To see a movie and mosaic of Mimas' shadow moving across the unlit side of the Rings, see PIA11660.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the Rings from about 32° below the Ring-Plane. The images were taken in Visible Light with the Cassini Spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 9, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approx. 1,1 MKM (such as about 684.000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-Spacecraft, or Phase, Angle of 55°.
Image scale is roughly 6 Km (a little less than 4 miles) per pixel".