This collage includes about 1,600 images submitted by members of the public as part of the NASA Cassini mission's "Wave at Saturn" campaign. On July 19, 2013, Cassini maneuvered into a special location to take a picture of the Saturn system backlit by the sun. Blocking out the sun's rays also enabled Cassini to take a picture of Earth, which would normally require looking almost directly at the sun and risking damage to the cameras' sensitive detectors. The "Wave at Saturn" event was the first to tell earthlings in advance that their picture was being taken from interplanetary distances.
This collage uses as a base image the backlit mosaic that was obtained on that same day, July 19, 2013, by the imaging cameras. That version is available at PIA17172.
Another version of this picture, using Earth as the base image, is available at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/collage2013.html#.Un2NLrZkCfw and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/imagedetails/index.cfm?imageId=4880.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's 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 and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.