The Cassini spacecraft captured this image of a dimly lit Titan as
Saturn's largest moon was eclipsed by the planet.
This view looks up toward the south pole of Titan which lies on the
terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the right of the visible
disk. Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Titan (5150
kilometers, or 3200 miles across). In Saturn's shadow, the southern
hemisphere of Titan is lit by two sources: sunlight scattered through the
planet's rings and refracted sunlight passing through the edge of Saturn's
atmosphere. A similar view of an eclipse of another moon, Tethys, can be
seen in PIA10443.
Stars in this image are smeared by the long camera exposure time of 560
seconds needed to capture the faint light on Titan. The image was taken in
visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 7,
2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 667,000
kilometers (414,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 58 degrees. Image scale is 40 kilometers (25 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 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.