Saturn's bright moon Enceladus hovers here, in front of a rings darkened
by Saturn's shadow. Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
This view is from less than one degree beneath the ring plane. If seen
from directly beneath the rings, the planet's giant shadow would appear
as an elongated half-ellipse; the acute viewing angle makes the shadow
look more like a strip here. (See PIA06193, for a different viewing angle).
The dark shadow first takes a bite out of the rings at the right, where
the distant, outermost ring material appears to taper and fade.
Ring features visible in this image from the outer ring edge inward
include: the A ring, the Cassini Division and the B ring. The C ring is
the darker region that dominates the rings here. The two gaps visible
near the center and below the left of the center are the Titan Gap, about
77,800 kilometers (48,300 miles) from Saturn, and an unnamed gap about
75,800 kilometers (47,100 miles) from the planet.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 7, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.1
million kilometers (650,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. The pixel scale
is 6 kilometers (4 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 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.
