A Breathtaking View of Five Saturn Moons: Big Pic

Sept. 21, 2011 -- Oh, to have a seat aboard Cassini, and see first-hand the sights of Saturn. Next best option? Pictures sent back from the robotic NASA probe, now in an extended tour of duty around the ringed planet.

The photo album includes this beauty (above), released Wednesday, taken when Cassini was in position to capture five of the planet's circling moons.

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That's Janus on the far left, tiny Pandora between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the picture, and then shiny Enceladus in the center. Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea is at the far right edge of the scene and finally Mimas, beyond Rhea, also on the right.

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Cassini's camera is facing north, toward the sunlight side of Saturn's rings, with Rhea closest to the planet and Enceladus just beyond the rings.

NASA says the image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. The two images shown here have been processed by Discovery News' Jason Major, adding some color to the otherwise gray-scale scene.

"Five of Saturn's moons are seen in this single view, and what I did was try to boost the color to show the variation in the different moons' hues and reflectivity (albedo)," Jason said on his Flickr page and posted on his space blog Lights In The Dark. "The brightest one in the center is Enceladus, which is extremely reflective as its surface is composed mostly of water ice. Rhea, seen on the right, gets a bit of a tan color from material sprayed out from Enceladus, while Mimas -- just behind Rhea -- is a more uniform grey."

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Another photo (taken by Cassini on Sept. 17) processed by Jason can be seen below. Saturn's moons Dione and Titan are lined up with the planet's rings.

-- by Irene Klotz. Ian O'Neill also contributed to this article.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI. Edited by Jason Major. Full-resolution raw images can be found on the CICLOPS site.