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Rhea Eclipses Dione Movie
Two crescent moons dance around Saturn as far-off Dione slips behind its
sibling moon Rhea. From Cassini's perspective, Rhea's bulk (1,528
kilometers, 949 miles wide) completely covered her smaller celestial
companion Dione (1,126 kilometers, 700 miles wide) for about three minutes
before the smaller moon re-emerged.
The images used for this movie sequence were taken over approximately 27
minutes as Cassini stared at Rhea. The images were aligned to keep Rhea
close to the center of the scene. Additional frames were inserted among
the 38 original Cassini images in order to smooth the appearance of
Dione's movement -- a scheme called interpolation. For another eclipse
movie showing these two moons, see PIA06199.
The clear-filter images in this movie were acquired with the Cassini
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 5, 2005, from a distance of 2.4 million
kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Rhea and 2.7 million kilometers (1.7
million miles) from Dione. Image scale is about 14 kilometers (9 miles)
per pixel on Rhea and 16 kilometers (10 miles) per pixel on Dione.
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.
