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Little Moons

 

The irregularly shaped moon Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) and the small ring moon Atlas (30 kilometers, 19 miles across) had just emerged from the darkness of Saturn's shadow when Cassini caught this view of the two moons.

The bright A ring is largely overexposed in this view, but several other ring details are nicely visible. The image shows two bright regions within the B ring (at right), ringlets of material within the dark, narrow Encke Gap and kinks in the F ring.

North on Saturn is tilted toward upper left. This view is from Cassini’s vantage point beneath the ringplane. It is notable that, as Saturn orbits the Sun, its shadow has been steadily creeping farther out along the ringplane and now extends beyond the F ring.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on January 26, 2005, from a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 81 degrees. The image scale is 19 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel.

 

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Little Moons
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