The Cassini spacecraft reveals Titan's upper-most atmospheric hazes,
creating the appearance of a halo around Saturn's largest moon.
For a color view of the atmosphere's upper layers from another viewing
geometry, see PIA11468.
Also visible in this image are hints of atmospheric banding around Titan's
north pole. The north pole lies near the terminator about a quarter of the
way inward from planet's limb at the top of this image. To learn more
about the northern bands, see PIA08928.
Most of the lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Titan
(5150 kilometers, or 3200 miles across). The image was taken in visible
violet light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 27,
2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 196,000
kilometers (122,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 106 degrees. Image scale is 12 kilometers (7 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.