Crescent Enceladus

Evoking the haunting beauty of Earth's Moon, a crescent Enceladus appears in the skies around Saturn.

Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up and rotated 25 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 1, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 329,000 miles (530,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 138 degrees. Image scale is 2 miles (3 kilometers) 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute