Tethys Aloft

An icy moon drifts above the stormy skies of Saturn.

Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is seen here before the dark line of the rings. The shadows of the C ring and B ring drape the northern hemisphere at top.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 15, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 22 kilometers (17 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