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This is a photograph of the edge of one of Saturn's rings, looking down from above. Those spiky dark shapes are shadows. Shadows of giant towers of ice and dust grains clumped together that rise up to three *kilometres* above the 10-m thick rings.

This is NASA Photojournal image PIA11668, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on 26 July 2009. At the time, the Sun was almost exactly aligned with the rings, enabling Cassini to image the shadows from these icy towers. The towers themselves are hard to see, pointing almost directly up at the camera.

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