The tilted crescent of Saturn displays lacy cloud bands here along with a
bright equatorial region and threadlike ring shadows on the northern
hemisphere.
Three moons are visible here. Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across)
at left and faint, is aligned with the ringplane. At right are Rhea (1,528
kilometers, or 949 miles across, at top) and Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or
665 miles across, below Rhea).
The image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 11, 2006, at a distance of
approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. The
image scale is 166 kilometers (103 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.