See last link for comparison views. Fred> RWG's incomprehension is way ahead of mine --- I cannot make visual sense of this abstractly impressive graphic at all! WFL rwg> Confession: I had Neil explain it to me first. But now I really get it. It's majestic! The northern hemisphere, lit by the bright upper surface of the rings, soars above them. The central dark smudge is due to the planet's shadow on the rings. The southern hemisphere is faintly lit by the light we see filtering through the underside of the rings. MRob> Part of that may be the fact that they look different from in front and from behind. rwg> But we're not seeing any front. MRob> To first approximation, the dark shadow pattern agrees with the bright Sunward-facing reflection pattern (what we usually see) but not necessarily with the backscatter pattern (which involves diffraction and other messy stuff). rwg> No, all we need is scatter and density. A backlit ring can be faint if too tenuous, or too dense to transmit. There's a density of maximum brightness. The apparent density varies with viewing angle. Note how the rings brighten with distance. Backscatter varies even more strongly. Look how the relatively tenuous inner rings light up the area just above the equator. MRob> I think it's the E ring, but maybe it's the G ring. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_outer_rings_labeled.jpg Ah, I'd somehow forgotten about those distant, fuzzy ones <http://gosper.org/backlit.png>. --rwg Consider neutrinium: a gravitationally closed ball of neutrinos.