The dark side of the ringplane glows with scattered light, including the
luminous F ring, which shines like a rope of brilliant neon. Below, Dione
(1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) presents an exquisitely thin
crescent.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The image was acquired with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 3, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and at
a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 160 degrees. Image scale is 11
kilometers (7 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.