Shadow-draped Saturn rests on its side as two icy moons glide past.
Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) hangs against the planet's bright southern
hemisphere. Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is a bright speck against the
unlit side of the rings, near lower right.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees above the
ringplane.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 31, 2007
using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of polarized infrared light
centered at 752 and 705 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 25 degrees. Image
scale is 158 kilometers (98 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.