Outside the soft edge of the F ring, Epimetheus (113 kilometers, 70 miles across) and Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) negotiate their nearly-shared orbit. The two moons’ orbits are typically about 50 kilometers (30 miles) apart, and the moons actually change orbits every few years: one moon becoming the innermost of the pair, the other becoming the outermost. The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on September 8, 2005, from a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is about 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on the two moons.

PIA 07615 Avg Rating: 10/10

Full Size 1008x355: JPEG 8 KB PNG 68 KB TIFF 358 KB