CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS

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Serenity of Saturn

 

As if drawn by an artist, this sublime scene speaks of the powerful beauty in the outer solar system: the domain of giant planets encircled by rings and orbited by small cratered moons of ice. In this view, Dione (1,123 kilometers, 698 miles across, at left) and Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across, at right) orbit the mighty ringed planet, while two bright storms swirl in the atmosphere below. This vantage point shows that the deceptively expansive rings are actually paper-thin in comparison: only tens of meters thick.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the wide angle camera on February 28, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 154 kilometers (96 miles) per pixel.

[Caption updated on October 4, 2005.]

 

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Serenity of Saturn
PIA 06606


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