Toward the Shadow

This strikingly crisp view shows Atlas heading into Saturn's shadow at upper left. The moon's basic, elongated shape is easy to detect here.

(See Watching Atlas's Waistline for a different perspective on Atlas.)

Above Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) in the image, a bright clump in the F ring also heads toward the darkness.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 30 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Atlas. 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