Three Meddlesome Moons

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Caption:

The effects of three of Saturn's ring moons can be spotted in this single narrow-angle camera view.

The image has been strongly enhanced to better show the wakes on both sides of the Encke Gap caused by Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across, left of center), as well as a hint of the edge waves in the narrow Keeler Gap caused by Daphnis (7 kilometers, 4.3 miles across, below center).

Bright Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across, at right) pulls away from its latest close encounter with the F ring. The aftereffects of its recent passes are visible in the ring's inner edge.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane. Saturn's shadow cuts across the rings at the top of the scene.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 5, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Pan. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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 .

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