Sunlight streams through the high-altitude haze layer that extends
completely around the giant moon, Titan, in this view of the moon taken by
the Cassini spacecraft. Some fine structure can be spotted in the
ever-shifting hazes in Titan's northern polar reaches to the top.
The distant sky beyond Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is
not empty, but instead is filled in the lower half by the barely visible,
immense bulk of Saturn 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) beyond. The
view is toward the night side of both worlds.
Titan's image is saturated, or over exposed, near the five o'clock
position, obscuring the details in the atmosphere.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 2, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.3
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Titan and at a
Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 163 degrees. Image scale is 14
kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Titan.
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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
