Dione is partly occulted by Saturn's rings in this nearly edge-on view,
taken from less than a tenth of a degree above the ringplane. The side of
the rings nearer to the Cassini spacecraft was masked by Saturn's shadow
at the time and appears dark.
Bright, wispy fractures on Dione's trailing hemisphere curl around the
horizon. Sunlit terrain seen on Dione (1,126 kilometers, 700 miles across)
is on the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere. North is up.
The image was taken in infrared light (centered at 752 nanometers) with
the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 3, 2005 at a distance
of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Dione
and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Resolution
in the original image was 15 kilometers (9 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
