Saturn Noir

Saturn's luminescent rings provide striking contrasts of light and darkness, as the irregular shape of Janus glides across the foreground.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

For a closer view of Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) see Superb Janus.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 29, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Janus. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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