Help understanding this unsettling image of Titan, Epimetheus, and Saturn's rings? The NY Times article Saturn’s Rings Are Sculpted by a Crew of Mini-Moons is really interesting and links to the recent paywalled paper in Science Close Cassini flybys of Saturn’s ring moons Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Pandora, and Epimetheus

But I absolutely can't understand one of the photos in the NY Times article, shown below. Titan seems to be...


behind Saturn's rings, and yet it is
huge relative the spacing of the rings, and yet it
appears to be out of focus while the rings and Epimetheus are in focus.


Can someone help me understand how all of these can be true at the same time?




  In the foreground, the moon Epimetheus appearing to hover above Saturn's rings. Epimetheus is dwarfed by Titan in the background.CreditNASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
This NASA page says this photo was taken on April 28 2006.

Using Celestia, I managed to find the picture from Cassini that best lines up with the photo. It doesn't match up precisely, but that's to be expected as the calculated orbital elements of all these moons (and cassini) in the software won't necessarily match up to reality precisely.


Below is the zoomed out version of this shot. You can see Titan in the centre and Epimetheus as a dot on top.

And here is the top down shot from Cassini to the moons. Circled are Epimetheus and Titan.


So to answer your question: Titan is really big compared to epimetheus (about 50x), Titan has an atmosphere and so appears fuzzy (It is actually in focus, everything in space is very far away and so is effectively at infinity for focusing purposes), and the rings are highly oblique, so you only see a small slice of them.