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Stately Saturn

Dec. 25, 2009
Saturn, stately and resplendent in this natural color view taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, dwarfs the icy moon Rhea. Rhea orbits beyond the rings on the right of the image. Tethys shadow is visible on the planet on the left of the image.

Saturn, stately and resplendent in this natural color view, dwarfs the icy moon Rhea.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) orbits beyond the rings on the right of the image. The moon Tethys is not shown here, but its shadow is visible on the planet on the left of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 4, 2009 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 72 kilometers (45 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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