Three of Saturn's diverse family of moons are captured in this view.
Smoggy Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) hovers above the
thin line of the rings. Much smaller Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72
miles across) is a mere speck at far left. Bright Enceladus (505
kilometers, or 314 miles across) sits directly in front of the ringplane
from the Cassini spacecraft's vantage point.
Saturn's rings cast dark shadows onto its northern hemisphere. As the
planet approaches equinox in 2009, the shadows will get closer and closer
to the equator and shrink in extent, eventually to emerge in the Southern
Hemisphere.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on July 23, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (889,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 82 kilometers (51 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.