This moody true color portrait of Saturn shows a world that can, at times,
seem as serene and peaceful as it is frigid and hostile. Saturn's
unlit-side rings embrace the planet while their shadows caress the
northern hemisphere.
Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) is a mere speck below the
rings, just left of the terminator. The view was obtained from about 15
degrees above the ringplane as Cassini continued its climb to higher
orbital inclinations.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The image was acquired with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 18, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 137 degrees. Image scale is 76
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.