Bird’s Eye View

The Cassini spacecraft looks down from a high-inclination orbit to spot two of Saturn's ring moons.

Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across at its widest point) leads a train of dark gores in the narrow F ring. Farther from Saturn lies Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across at its widest point), which sits in its own faint ring -- invisible here but clearly seen in Moon-Made Rings.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 62 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 19, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 740,000 kilometers (460,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 41 kilometers (25 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