Eclipsing a Moon

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Caption:

Saturn's moon Enceladus is partially eclipsed by the planet in this Cassini spacecraft view which also features the moon Titan in the distance.

Cassini flew by Enceladus, shown in the center of the view, at a distance of about 16,000 miles (26,000 kilometers). The terminator between the day and night sides of Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) can be seen on the far left of the moon, while the shadow of the eclipsing planet runs across the bottom.

Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) is in the bottom right of this image and is about 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from the spacecraft. See PIA11508 to see Titan eclipsed by the planet.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing sides of Enceladus and Titan. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 1, 2011. The view was obtained at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Scale in the original image was 2 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel on Enceladus. The image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of 1.5 to enhance the visibility of surface features.

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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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