Shining a Second Light

Sunlight illuminates a bright crescent on Saturn's moon Enceladus while Saturnshine dimly lights more of the moon.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across). North on Enceladus is up and rotated 30 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 17, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 117 degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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