In Saturn's shadow, the southern hemisphere of Enceladus is lit by
sunlight reflected first off of the rings and then onto the nightside of
the planet.
Other sources of illumination include sunlight reflected off Titan, Dione,
and Rhea, which, at the time this image was acquired, were all positioned
in the same place in the Enceladan sky.
The deep Labtayt Sulci lie at the top of this image, which is nearly
centered on the moon's South pole.
While features in the center of this image are in sharp focus, those near
the limb appear blurred because the spacecraft was receding from Enceladus
at 16 kilometers (10 miles) per second during this long exposure.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 31, 2008 at a distance of approximately
137,000 kilometers (85,100 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 73 degrees. Image scale is
818 meters (2,682 feet) 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.