The moon Prometheus and a bit of Saturn's northern hemisphere are both
brilliantly lit by the sun here, making the A ring seem dim in comparison.
The bright limb of Saturn's northern hemisphere can be seen through the A
ring in the lower left of the image. Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53
miles across) orbits in the Roche Division between Saturn's A and F ring.
For a similar view of Pandora, another of the F ring's shepherding moons,
see PIA09899.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 20 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in red light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 25, 2009. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 694,000 kilometers (431,000 miles) from
Prometheus and at a Sun-prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49
degrees. Image scale is 3.6 kilometers (2.2 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.