This fanciful view spies the Saturnian moons, Dione and Enceladus, from
just beneath the ringplane. Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles
across) is on the near side of the rings with respect to Cassini, and
Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is on the far side.
Saturn's shadow stretches beyond the outermost reaches of the main rings,
causing them to disappear at left.
The image was taken with the Cassini narrow-angle camera using spectral
filters sensitive to polarized green light on Oct. 15, 2005 at a distance
of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Dione and
1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Enceladus. The image scale is
12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Dione and 9 kilometers (6 miles) per
pixel on Enceladus.
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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
