Image: Saturn's north pole basking in light

Sunlight truly has come to Saturn's north pole. The whole northern region is bathed in sunlight in this view from late 2016, feeble though the light may be at Saturn's distant domain in the solar system.

Cassini makes first ring-grazing plunge

NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft has made its first close dive past the outer edges of Saturn's rings since beginning its penultimate mission phase on Nov. 30.

Image: In daylight on Saturn's night side

NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks down at the rings of Saturn from above the planet's nightside. The darkened globe of Saturn is seen here at lower right, along with the shadow it casts across the rings.

Image: Not really starless at Saturn

Saturn's main rings, along with its and moons, are much brighter than most stars. As a result, much shorter exposure times (10 milliseconds, in this case) are required to produce an image and not saturate the detectors of ...

Image: Saturn askew

As a convention for public release, Cassini images of Saturn are generally oriented so that Saturn appears north up, but the spacecraft views the planet and its expansive rings from all sorts of angles. Here, a half-lit Saturn ...

Image: Saturn's rings dividing Dione

Dione appears cut in two by Saturn's razor-thin rings, seen nearly edge-on in a view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This scene was captured from just 0.02 degrees above the ring plane.

Image: Tethys dwarfed by Saturn

It is easy to forget just how large Saturn is, at around 10 times the diameter of Earth. And with a diameter of about 72,400 miles (116,500 kilometers), the planet simply dwarfs its retinue of moons. One of those satellites, ...

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