This Cassini image captured Saturn's moon Pan (25 kilometers, or 16 miles,
across) just after the little moon emerged from Saturn's shadow. Pan
orbits within the narrow Encke Gap (300 kilometers, or 186 miles, wide).
A faint hint of the narrow ringlet within the Encke Gap in earlier
Cassini images (see PIA06554) is visible here.
Saturn's rings appear extremely overexposed due to the enhancement used
to make Pan visible, but the processing technique also makes other faint
features stand out. In addition to the bright, knotted core of the F ring,
two faint nearby ringlets can be seen. At right, this view of the Cassini
Division shows that there is actually a great amount of material embedded
within it.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Dec. 1, 2004, at a distance of approximately 4.1 million
kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 25
kilometers (15 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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.