Dione looks lovely half lit in this portrait from the Cassini spacecraft. Just visible is a long canyon running southward just left of the terminator.
The view looks down at northern latitudes on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2006 at a distance of approximately 939,000 kilometers (583,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.
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, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.