Dione is partly eclipsed here by the narrow band of Saturn's rings, which in this image, display one of the interesting ways that they transmit light.
Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope noticed during the 1995 ringplane crossing that the brightness of the rings when viewed nearly edge-on was dominated by the F ring. In this image, the near and far edges of the F ring form the bright upper and lower boundaries of the rings. The dark strip in between is not empty (otherwise Dione would likely be visible there), but rather represents the material in the A and B rings.
This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Dione (1,123 kilometers, 698 miles across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on March 13, 2005 from a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Dione. Resolution in the image is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.
[Caption updated on October 4, 2005.]
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.