Another Cassini Stunner

Gorgeous, isn't it?

Not retilted from the original picture (unlike the one below), this one show's Saturn's northern hemisphere to the left, blue (for the same reason Earth's skies look blue) and with the rings' shadows spread out in all their complexity; and the golden equatorial regions, Saturn's natural color (why not blue? we aren't sure yet, but possibly the clouds there are higher - maybe the deeper blue in the north is a seasonal effect); and then the southern hemisphere, pale mauve and blue and butterscotch...

That thin line bisecting the planet is the rings seen dead on, and that little bump at the top (to the east) is the shepherd moon Enceladus (515 km/314 miles across). (Epimetheus, two posts below, is only 71 miles across - big Titan is 5150 km/3200 miles across (bigger than Mercury!) and our Moon, for comparison, is 3500 km/2174 miles across. Saturn has it all!)

Cassini just keeps on sending us these gorgeous pictures.