Cassini's finely-tuned vision reveals hazes high in the skies over Titan
in this narrow angle camera image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on May
22, 2004. Here the northern hemisphere is notably brighter than the
southern hemisphere. This trait was noticed in images returned by the
Voyager spacecraft, but the effect is presently reversed, North to South,
as Titan is currently experiencing opposite seasons from those during the
Voyager epoch 23 years ago.
The image was taken from a distance of 21.7 million kilometers (13.5
million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to strong
absorption by methane gas (centered at 889 nanometers). The image scale
is 129 kilometers (80 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras,
were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based
at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.