Two of Saturn's moons make appearances in this view in very different
ways.
Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) glides past at bottom, near
the edge-on ringplane. Above are the arcing shadows cast onto the northern
hemisphere by the rings, along with the shadow of Mimas (397 kilometers,
or 247 miles across) against a backdrop of wispy clouds. Mimas' shadow
appears elliptical due to its projection onto the spheroidal shape of
Saturn's visible atmosphere.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug.
5, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 4 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 47 kilometers (29 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.