In a rare moment, the Cassini spacecraft captured this enduring portrait
of a near-alignment of four of Saturn's restless moons. Timing is critical
when trying to capture a view of multiple bodies, like this one. All four
of the moons seen here were on the far side of the rings from the
spacecraft when this image was taken; and about an hour later, all four
had disappeared behind Saturn.
Seen here are Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) and Dione
(1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) at bottom; Prometheus (102
kilometers, or 63 miles across) hugs the rings at center; Telesto (24
kilometers, or 15 miles across) is a mere speck in the darkness above
center.
This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 17, 2005, at a distance of approximately
3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Titan and 2.5 million
kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Dione. The image scale is 16
kilometers (10 miles) per pixel on Dione and 21 kilometers (13 miles)
per pixel on Titan.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
