Alone With the Giant

A small moon travels its circuit just outside the main rings of Saturn. Epimetheus (116 kilometers, 72 miles across) is absolutely dwarfed by the giant planet.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 5 degrees above the ringplane. The night side of the planet's southern hemisphere is illuminated by ringshine -- sunlight reflected off the rings .The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 14, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 102 kilometers (63 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute