Moon Spot

The shadow of Tethys drifts across the face of Saturn. Nearby, shadows of the planet's rings form a darkened band above the equator.

This view looks toward Saturn from a vantage point 63 degrees north of the equator.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 1, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 615,000 kilometers (382,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 37 kilometers (23 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