Soft light from Saturn lifts the veil of night from the moons Dione (lower
left) and Rhea (upper right).
A scant crescent on each satellite marks the limit of the Sun's direct
reach. The remaining light is reflected onto the moons by the Ringed
Planet.
This view was acquired using an image compression scheme that results in minor artifacts being present -- on Rhea in particular. Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across, and pictured above) is somewhat bland in appearance at this image scale, although Dione's spectacular fractures stand out marvelously. Dione is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles) across.
North on both moons is rotated 45 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.6
million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Dione and 2.8 million
kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 15 kilometers
(10 miles) per pixel on Dione and 17 kilometers (11 miles) on Rhea.
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.
