Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn's Ring Plane
			
		
		
		
			If this is Saturn, where are the rings?  
When Saturn's "/day/pendages" 
disappeared in 1612, 
Galileo 
did not understand why.   
Later that century, it became understood that 
Saturn's 
unusual protrusions were rings and that when the 
Earth crosses the ring plane, 
the edge-on rings will 
appear to disappear.  
This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a 
razor blade.  
In modern times, the 
robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn frequently crossed 
Saturn's ring plane during its mission to Saturn, 
from 2004 to 2017.  
A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February 
was dug out of the vast 
online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur 
Fernando Garcia Navarro.  
Pictured here, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, 
is the striking result.  
Saturn's thin ring plane 
appears in blue, bands and clouds in 
Saturn's upper atmosphere 
appear in gold.
Details of Saturn's rings can be seen in the high 
dark shadows across the top of this image, 
taken back in 2005.
The moons 
Dione and 
Enceladus appear as 
bumps in the rings.