PIA08837: Encircling Saturn

Saturn's sunlit rings gleam in the blackness as two icy moons cruise past in the foreground.

Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) is a small crescent near upper left; Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) is a speck above the F ring, near center. Janus was brightened slightly for visibility.

This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 5 degrees below the ringplane.

This image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 7, 2006, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 139 degrees. Image scale on the sky at the distance of Saturn is 63 kilometers (39 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.