CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Sidelong at Saturn

Cassini looks toward the Saturnian horizon as Dione and Janus glide past.

A few craters are visible on Dione (1,123 kilometers, 698 miles across). Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) is slightly blurred due to its motion during the exposure.

The rings appear essentially edge-on in this view, as Cassini continues its recent activities close to the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 10, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 17 kilometers (11 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: April 17, 2006 (PIA 08158)
Image/Caption Information 		  Sidelong at Saturn
PIA 08158
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