A crescent-lit Enceladus ejects a frozen mist of water ice into space in this image, a combination of three raw files captured by the Cassini orbiter on September 22, 2010. At this high phase angle the jets become visible as the icy particles brightly reflect the sunlight passing almost directly through them towards Cassini’s lens.

I stitched three images together to create a vertical composition, making the jets, the mist and Enceladus visible in the same image while accentuating the moon’s position against a field of stars. The stars in the bottom 2/3 of the image were visible as shown in one of the original images; the stars surrounding the moon at the top were added from another image and are not accurately placed. Portions of Enceladus were brightened to bring out some surface detail in the shadow area.

See this and more images on my Flickr gallery.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Edited by J. Major.