Here it comes, Mimas emerges from behind hazy Saturn, and you see that the rings appear distorted near the planet as their image passes through the upper atmosphere. The limb of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) is slightly flattened on the left side by the rim of the large crater Herschel. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 9 degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on November 30, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Mimas. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Mimas.

Speaking of Mimas, the great basin that interrupts the contours of this moon's crescent identifies the satellite unmistakably as Mimas. The giant crater Herschel (130 kilometers, or 80 miles wide) is this moon's most obvious feature. North on Mimas is up and rotated 23 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on September 8, 2006 at a distance of approximately 534,000 kilometers (331,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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, Colorado. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at this site.