Enceladus in Front of Saturn
Written by Fraser Cain
Enceladus hanging against Saturn's rings. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Click to enlarge
This beautiful natural colour image shows Enceladus hanging in front of Saturn and its rings. This view of Saturn shows the terminator; the line across the planet that separates day from night. Cassini took separate images with its red, green, and blue filters, and then controllers combined the images together on computer. Cassini took this photograph on January 17, 2006 when it was 200,000 kilometers (125,000 miles) from Enceladus.
Enceladus hangs like a single bright pearl against the golden-brown canvas of Saturn and its icy rings. Visible on Saturn is the region where daylight gives way to dusk. Above, the rings throw thin shadows onto the planet.
Icy Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were taken using the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2006 at a distance of approximately 200,000 kilometers (100,000 miles) from Enceladus. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .
Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release
Filed under: Saturn
Leave a Reply