Following its first flyby of Titan, Cassini gazed back at the
smog-enshrouded moon's receding crescent. This natural color view was
seen by the spacecraft about one day after closest approach. The slight
bluish glow of Titan's haze is visible along the limb.
The superimposed coordinate system grid in the accompanying image at
right illustrates the geographical regions of the moon that are
illuminated and visible, as well as the orientation of Titan -- lines of
longitude converge on the South Pole near the moon's eastern limb. The
yellow curve marks the position of the boundary between day and night on
Titan.
Images taken through blue, green and red filters were combined to create
this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini
spacecraft wide angle camera on July 3, 2004, from a distance of about
790,000 kilometers (491,000 miles) from Titan and at a
Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase angle of 115 degrees. The image scale is
47 kilometers (29 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.