Magnificent blue and gold Saturn floats obliquely as one of its
gravity-bound companions, Dione, hangs in the distance. The darkened rings
seem to nearly touch their shadowy reverse images on the planet below.
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 9 degrees
above the ring plane. The rings glow feebly in the scattered light that
filters through them.
Dione is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Feb. 4, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.2
million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 75
kilometers (47 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.
