A small moon travels its circuit just outside the main rings of Saturn.
Epimetheus (116 kilometers, 72 miles across) is absolutely dwarfed by the
giant planet.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 5
degrees above the ringplane. The night side of the planet's southern
hemisphere is illuminated by ringshine -- sunlight reflected off the
rings.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Nov. 14, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 102 kilometers (63 miles) per pixel.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.