Graceful giant Saturn poses with a few of the small worlds it holds close.
From this viewpoint the Cassini spacecraft can see across the entirety of
the planet's shadow on the rings, to where the ringplane emerges once
again into sunlight.
Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) shines large and bright
near the bottom of the scene. Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across)
sits outside the F ring, below center. Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72
miles across) is a speck on the far side of the ringplane, immediately to
the right of Saturn's limb. Most of the other bright specks near the rings
are background stars.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 8
degrees above the ringplane. The image has been brightened to enhance the
appearance of the small moons.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June
2, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 918 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 131 kilometers (81 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.