Inclined Dione

Dione looms large before the rings of Saturn.

Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) can be spotted to the lower left of the larger moon, peeking out from behind the rings.

This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). North is up and rotated 25 degrees to the right. The view is toward the sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 22, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 695,000 kilometers (432,000 miles) from Dione. Image scale is 4 kilometers (3 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.