Feast your eyes upon this marvelous new shot of Saturn’s moon Mimas, released today by the Cassini imaging team. Mimas, as you may recall, bears some resemblance to the Death Star, of Star Wars fame.

Image Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute (click to enlarge)

This amazing perspective view captures battered Mimas against the hazy limb of Saturn.

It is obvious in such close-up images that Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) has been badly scarred by impacts over the eons. Its 130 kilometer- (80 mile-) wide crater, Herschel, lies in the darkness at right.

North on Mimas is up and rotated 19 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 21, 2006 using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 191,000 kilometers (119,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 91 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (3,730 feet) per pixel.

On a side note: I don’t usually write about sci-fi; the sci interests me exponentially more than the -fi. However, there’s been a significant development on the Star Wars front — beginning September 12th, we fans of the original trilogy will be able to purchase DVDs of episodes IV, V, and VI as they originally appeared in the theatrical releases, without the ridiculous exercises in revisionism performed by George Lucas (the most egregious of which came in the form of 2004’s “Special Edition” DVDs).

Over the years, a truly countless number of fans have told us that they would love to see and own the original version that they remember experiencing in theaters,” said Jim Ward, President of LucasArts and Senior Vice President of Lucasfilm Ltd.

It’s about damned time.