Cassini finds artistic harmony in the dark and icy realm of Saturn. The
view shows the crescent of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across)
and the outer edge of Saturn's main rings.
The dim, unlit side of the rings is shown here. The narrow F ring appears
bright when seen from angles near the plane of the rings. Saturn's shadow
engulfs the rings along their near edge.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on April 29, 2006 at a distance of approximately
884,000 kilometers (549,000 miles) from Tethys. Image scale is 53
kilometers (33 miles) per pixel on Tethys.
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.