Tilted Giant

This moody portrait of Saturn captures a razor-thin ringplane bisecting the clouds of the bright equatorial region. The rings cast dark, shadowy bands onto the planet's northern latitudes. At left, Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is a tiny sunlit orb against the planet's dark side. The image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 7, 2005 at a distance of approximately 3.1 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 96 degrees. Image scale is 179 kilometers (111 miles) per pixel. http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07673