Another of Mimas' stunning, silent transits

"This spectacular and disorienting maze of lines is a Cassini portrait of the gas giant Saturn, its rings and its small, icy moon Mimas. The rings cast dark shadows across Saturn's northern hemisphere, creating a photonegative effect: dark sections are dense and block the Sun, while bright sections are less dense areas or gaps in the rings, which are more transparent to sunlight.

"Saturn's moon Mimas (397 km across) is seen here against the backdrop created by the shadow of the dense B ring. Above Mimas and the B ring shadow can be seen the broad gap of the Cassini Division. The actual Cassini Division, which divides the A and B rings, is visible about one-third of the way up from the bottom of the image.

"This view was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 15, 2004, at a distance of approximately 4.7 million kilometers from Saturn. The image scale is 28 kilometers per pixel."

[Another profile of Mimas (in color)... and yet another (in black and white)]


As a lil' bonus:

"Appearances can be deceiving in two-dimensional images like this one, where it is difficult to tell which objects are in the foreground and which are farther away. In this scene, Tethys is the closest object to Cassini, at 1.2 million kilometers away. Epimetheus is on the near side of the rings and is 1.4 million kilometers distant. The giant moon Titan is 2.7 million kilometers away, more than twice as far from Cassini as Tethys.

"This view is a mosaic of two images taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 19, 2005. The image scale in the scene ranges from 16 kilometers per pixel on Titan to 7 kilometers per pixel on Tethys."