CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Titan Shines Through

Titan's smoggy atmosphere glows brilliantly in scattered sunlight, creating a thin, gleaming crescent beyond Saturn's rings. At this slight angle above the ringplane, the thin F ring shines brightly. Light from Titan's eastern and western limbs penetrates the narrow Encke Gap.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 18, 2006, at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (600,000 miles) from Saturn. Planet-sized Titan (5,150 kilometers, 3,200 miles across) was 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) distant from Cassini at that time. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: March 3, 2006 (PIA 08126)
Image/Caption Information 		  Titan Shines Through
PIA 08126
Avg Rating: 8.95/10

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