Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

Ringside with Dione

Caption: Speeding toward pale, icy Dione, Cassini's view is enriched by the tranquil gold and blue hues of Saturn beyond. The spacecraft was very nearly in the plane of the rings at this time, thinning them by perspective and masking their awesome scale. The thin, curving shadows of the C ring and part of the B ring adorn the northern latitudes visible here, a reminder of the rings' grandeur.

It is notable that Dione, like most of the other icy Saturnian satellites, looks no different in natural color than in monochrome images.

Images taken with blue, green and infrared (centered at 752 nanometers) spectral filters were used to create this color view, which approximates the scene as it would appear to the human eye. The images were obtained with the wide angle camera from a distance of approximately 39,000 kilometers (24,200 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 22 degrees. The image scale is about 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.