Hazy Halo

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.