Saturn's southern atmosphere looms before Cassini, displaying rich detail
in its swirls and bands. The bright, icy moon Enceladus (499 kilometers,
or 310 miles across) appears near the bottom of the image.
This view was taken through a filter where methane gas is a moderate
absorber of sunlight. Since methane gas is not present on Enceladus, its
surface scatters a higher percentage of the light falling on it than
Saturn does, making the moon appear very bright compared with the planet.
Enceladus was dimmed in brightness by a factor of four during processing
of the image, in order to make its brightness comparable to that of
Saturn.
The rings show some fine structure here. The three main rings, C, B and A
from innermost to outermost, are clearly defined by their differences in
brightness.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Sept. 19, 2004, at a distance of 8.3 million kilometers (5.2 million
miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 49 kilometers (30
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.
