Speeding toward pale, icy Dione, Cassini's view is enriched by the
tranquil gold and blue hues of Saturn in the distance. The horizontal
stripes near the bottom of the image are Saturn's rings. The spacecraft
was nearly in the plane of the rings when the images were taken, thinning
them by perspective and masking their awesome scale. The thin, curving
shadows of the C ring and part of the B ring adorn the northern latitudes
visible here, a reminder of the rings' grandeur.
It is notable that Dione, like most of the other icy Saturnian satellites,
looks no different in natural color than in monochrome images.
Images taken on Oct. 11, 2005, with blue, green and infrared (centered at
752 nanometers) spectral filters were used to create this color view,
which approximates the scene as it would appear to the human eye. The
images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a
distance of approximately 39,000 kilometers (24,200 miles) from Dione and
at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 22 degrees. The image scale
is about 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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.