Cassini delivers this stunning vista showing small, battered Epimetheus
and smog-enshrouded Titan, with Saturn's A and F rings stretching across
the scene.
The color information in the colorized view is completely artificial: it
is derived from red, green and blue images taken at nearly the same time
and phase angle as the clear filter image. This color information was
overlaid onto the previously released clear filter view (see PIA07786) in
order to approximate the scene as it might appear to human eyes.
The prominent dark region visible in the A ring is the Encke gap (325
kilometers, or 200 miles wide), in which the moon Pan (26 kilometers, or
16 miles across) and several narrow ringlets reside. Moon-driven features
which score the A ring can easily be seen to the left and right of the
Encke gap.
A couple of bright clumps can be seen in the F ring.
Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across and giant Titan is 5,150
kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
The view was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
April 28, 2006, at a distance of approximately 667,000 kilometers (415,000
miles) from Epimetheus and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from
Titan. The image captures the illuminated side of the rings. The image
scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel on Epimetheus and 11 kilometers
(7 miles) per pixel on Titan.
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.
