F Ring in Between

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Caption:

Two ring moons sweep through the scene as Cassini focuses on Saturn's intriguing F ring.

Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is seen at right with its edge waves in the Keeler Gap. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) appears at left.

This image is part of a movie sequence designed to observe the appearance of the F ring and its faint flanking ringlets. As such, the exposure was not optimized to image Pandora, therefore the moon is overexposed.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 22 degrees above the ringplane.The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 5, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (718,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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