Dusk on Dione

In this recent view of Dione, the Cassini spacecraft looks on as the moon’s slow rotation brings the terrain from day into night. Any residents of Dione would have plenty of time to read a few bedtime stories, though, since the moon’s rotation period is 66 hours.
Saturn’s fourth-largest moon, Dione is 698 miles (1,123 kilometers) across.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Dione. North on Dione is up and rotated 10 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 30, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 108 degrees. Image scale is 4 miles (7 kilometers) 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://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.