Like a rope of brilliant neon, Saturn's rings outshine everything else in
this night side view, while the sunlit southern face of the rings reflects
a dim glow onto the atmosphere below. When viewed nearly edge-on, the
rings often appear very bright.
Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) and Janus (181 kilometers,
or 113 miles across) are mere specks to the left of the ring edge,
Epimetheus being the outermost of the pair.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Dec. 17, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.7
million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. The image scale is
164 kilometers (102 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
