Brightness of Saturn's rings with decreasing solar elevation

Early ground-based and spacecraft observations suggested that the temperature of Saturn's main rings (A, B and C) varied with the solar elevation angle, B′. Data from the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) on board Cassini, which has been in orbit around Saturn for more than five years, confirm this variation and have been used to derive the temperature of the main rings from a wide variety of geometries while B′ varied from near −24∘ to 0∘ (Saturn's equinox).