Cassini spied the moon Enceladus in the distance beyond Saturn's south
pole in this image from Sept. 19, 2004.
This view was taken in wavelengths of ultraviolet light where gas
molecules in Saturn's high atmosphere scatter a great deal of sunlight.
Since Enceladus (499 kilometers, or 310 miles, across) has an unusually
high reflectivity, its surface reflects even more of the light falling on
it than Saturn does, making the moon appear very bright compared the
planet. Enceladus was dimmed in brightness by a factor of three during
processing of the image, in order to make its brightness comparable to
that of Saturn.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a
distance of 8.3 million kilometers (5.2 million miles) from Saturn. 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 Science Mission
Directorate, 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.