A small moon clings to the edge of Saturn's A ring. External to the moon
is the thin and contorted F ring.
The flattened shape of Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) is just
discernible. See PIA08405 for higher resolution views of Atlas.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 9
degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 8, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Atlas.
Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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.