The shadow of Epimetheus, one of Saturn's co-orbital moons, races across
the planet's restless cloud tops. Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles
across) cruises along beyond the orbits of the narrow F ring and its
shepherd moons.
Farther south on Saturn, the swirls and eddies are obscured by the shadow
of the outer A ring and its two prominent, moon-containing gaps, Encke
(bottom) and Keeler (dim, at the A ring edge).
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a
spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728
nanometers. The view was obtained on June 30, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 335,000 kilometers (208,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 16 kilometers (10 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.