Sidelong View

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Caption:

Saturn's enchanting rings display crisply defined edges and strong contrast on their unilluminated side.

Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) sits on the far side of the rings above center, between the A and F rings. This view was acquired from about 1 degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 21, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Atlas. Image scale is 14 kilometers (9 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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