Saturn's luminescent rings provide striking contrasts of light and
darkness, as the irregular shape of Janus glides across the foreground.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than
a degree above the ringplane.
For a closer view of Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) see PIA08296.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 29, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Janus. Image
scale is 7 kilometers (4 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.