Titan shines beyond the rings like a brilliant ring of fire, its light
gleaming here and there through the gaps in Saturn's magnificent plane of
ice.
Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is surrounded by a thick
photochemical haze which scatters the Sun's light.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 5.3
million kilometers (3.3 million miles) from Titan and at a
Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 158 degrees. Image scale is 32
kilometers (20 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.