This wonderful sight is brought to us courtesy of the Cassini spacecraft which has been studying Saturn and its satellites over the last decade. Enceladus can be seen above Saturn’s rings while Rhea lies below them in this picture. The tiny Atlas (only 30 kilometers across) is also supposedly captured just to the left of Rhea, expertly hidden within one of Saturn’s rings. This picture was taken using Cassini’s narrow angle camera or Imaging Science System. Cassinia was somewhere between 2 million and 2.8 million kilometers from these Saturnian moons when this picture was taken.

Darkness falls on the night side of massive Saturn and its tiny moon Tethys. Tethys is literally quite tiny as it is just 1,062 kilometers across and in this picture, is just barely seen (thanks to being brightened by NASA in post production) in the lower left quadrant.

The Cassini spacecraft took this picture with its wide-angle camera, utilizing a special filter allows near-infrared light wavelengths. It was taken when Cassini was about 2.4 million kilometers from Saturn.

These surface chasms on Saturn’s moon Dione are of great interests to scientists. Some parts of the surface are covered by linear features, called chasmata which is in dramatic contrast to the impact craters that one would typically see on planet, satellites and other celestial bodies. This view from a distance of 110,000 kilometers was taken by Cassini Orbiter’s narrow angle camera with North looking up on Dione.

This view of Saturn’s rings was taken by the Cassini spacecraft’s wide angle camera. The picture was taken at a distance of 911,000 kilometers from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-Cassini, angle of 37 degrees. The rings of Saturn look like flat platters at in this picture. Also (barely) visible near the eight o’clock position, by the planet’s A-ring, is Saturn’s satellite Prometheus.

From this view, one may think they were looking at a rock or an organism under a microscope. But in fact this is a picture of Hyperion, one of Saturn’s moons. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took this picture (from 38,000 km) of the odd shaped moon using its narrow angle camera.

This second picture of Hyperion was taken as Cassini was leaving after its flyby of Saturn’s moon. North on Hyperion is up and rotated 37 degrees to the right.

It has been a couple of years since Cassini was orbiting in Saturn’s equatorial plane before it returned in March of this year. On its journey back from the higher inclination orbits, Cassini flew by the icy Saturnian moon Rhea. These two composite colour pictures of Rhea were take about 30 minutes apart using a combination of clear, green, infrared and ultraviolet spectral filters. Cassini’s narrow and wide angle camera’s were used for these pictures of Rhea.

It is not often that you would see this gathering of three of Saturn’s many moons in one picture. The Cassini spacecraft was able to capture Pandora, Prometheus, and Pan (from right to left) in this picture using its narrow angle camera. It is also believed that these moons play a role in keeping Saturn’s F-ring narrow. This picture was taken from a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.6 million kilometers) on January 2, 2015 using the visible light spectrum. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings.

Iapetus is an interesting satellite of Saturn in that it has both a light side and a dark side – a yin and yang. Italian mathematician, astronomer, engineer, and astrologer Giovanni Cassini was first to observe the dark-light difference when he discovered Iapetus in 1671. So it is fitting that this picture was taken by the space exploration mission partly named after him (Cassini-Huygens). The narrow angle camera on the Cassini orbiter took this photograph of Iapetus from a distance of approximately 4 million kilometers.

No matter how many pictures one may have seen of them, the rings of Saturn have a fascinating, almost mystical effect on many people. For this reason the Cassini space probe and its advanced imaging systems have been a boon for Saturn enthusiasts. The on board narrow angle camera took this picture of the rings in red light so that researchers could study the subtle color variations of Saturn’s rings (as they are all red). This shot captured the rings from a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers away from Saturn, looking toward the sunlit side of the planet’s rings and about 11 degrees above the ringplane.

At first sight, this looks more like a irregularly shaped piece of ‘space junk’ floating along than the moon of a planet. But in fact, this is Janus, one of Saturn’s moons. Named after the ancient Roman god of beginnings (which is why we start the Gregorian calendar with the month of January),  this 179 kilometers wide satellite was photographed by Cassini using its narrow angle camera from a distance of 87,000 kilometers. Barely visible at the bottom of the picture are Saturn’s F-rings.