May 02, 2014 11:57 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken yet another stunning shot, this time of the distant ice giant Uranus.

According to a news release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Cassini snapped the photo April 11 with its wide-angle lens. Cassini is orbiting Saturn and has previously released several other shots of the planet, including a portrait of Earth.

CLICK HERE for the full-res image.

Known as the "Pale Blue Dot" photo, Earth's latest portrait features our planet as a small spec below Saturn's rings. While Earth is blue for water, Uranus gets its color from its methane gas atmosphere, emitting blue wavelengths.

From the JPL release:

"The planets Uranus and Neptune are sometimes referred to as 'ice giants' to distinguish them from their larger siblings, Jupiter and Saturn, the classic "gas giants." The moniker derives from the fact that a comparatively large part of the planets' composition consists of water, ammonia and methane, which are typically frozen as ices in the cold depths of the outer solar system. Jupiter and Saturn are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, with smaller percentages of these ices.

"When this view was obtained, Uranus was nearly on the opposite side of the sun as seen from Saturn, at a distance of approximately 28.6 astronomical units from Cassini and Saturn. An astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the sun, equal to 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). At their closest - once during each Saturn orbit of nearly 30 years - the two planets approach to within about 10 astronomical units of each other."

NASA scientists will also be able to use the images from Cassini's mission to adjust their instruments to the correct settings.

NASA launched Cassini, a collaborative mission with the European Space Agency, in 1997 and it began its orbit of Saturn in 2004. The spacecraft has gathered important information on two of Saturn's moons, Titan and Enceladus, including a discovery of an underground ocean beneath the latter's surface.

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