Like a light in the darkness: Dione

This moody portrait of Saturn captures a razor-thin Ring-Plane bisecting the clouds of the bright Equatorial Region. The Rings cast dark, shadowy bands onto the Planet's Northern Latitudes.
At left, Dione 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 app.x 3,1 MKM (about 1,9 MMs) from Saturn and at a phase angle of 96°. Image scale is 179 Km (about 111 miles) per pixel.