Arc and Crescent

Cassini finds artistic harmony in the dark and icy realm of Saturn. The view shows the crescent of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) and the outer edge of Saturn's main rings.

The dim, unlit side of the rings is shown here. The narrow F ring appears bright when seen from angles near the plane of the rings. Saturn's shadow engulfs the rings along their near edge.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 29, 2006 at a distance of approximately 884,000 kilometers (549,000 miles) from Tethys. Image scale is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

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