Happy New Year

"For centuries people have studied Saturn's rings, but questions about the structure and composition of the rings remained a mystery for many years. It was only in 1857 when the physicist James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that the rings must be composed of many small particles and not solid rings around the planet, and not until the 1970s that spectroscopic evidence definitively showed that the rings are composed mostly of water ice.

"This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 17 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 12, 2014 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers

Daily Image Release: Translucent Rings
CICLOPS CAPTAIN'S LOG INDEX | DECEMBER 8, 2014
http://www.ciclops.org/view/7932/Translucent-Rings?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews&js=1

Although solid-looking in many images, Saturn's rings are actually translucent. In this case, we can glimpse the shadow of the ...