Black&White&Colors: Dione and Saturn

Cool and icy Dione floats in front of giant Saturn bedecked in a dazzling array of colors.
The surface of Dione, which exhibits contrasting bright and dark areas when viewed up close, appears pale in this image. It is Saturn's multi-hued cloud bands that boldly steal the show. Discrete clouds and eddies in Saturn's Northern Hemisphere can be seen within the faint shadows of the Rings on the Planet. Cassini is in a phase of its mission in which its orbit will be nearly equatorial for some time. This view was obtained from about 1/3ed of 1° out of the Ring-Plane.

Images taken with red, green and blue filters were used to create this natural-color view.
The images were obtained with the wide-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2005, from a distance of approx. 803.000 Km (roughly 499.000 miles) from Dione and at a phase angle of about 43°.
The image scale is about 48 Km (30 miles) per pixel.