Banded Moon

This Cassini spacecraft view of Titan shows banding in the atmosphere of the moon's northern hemisphere.

Like the planet Venus, Titan's atmosphere rotates faster than its surface, a characteristic called "super rotation."

North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up.

White specks seen on Titan are artifacts of the process used to enhance features in the moon's atmosphere. The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 28, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 185,000 kilometers (115,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 89 degrees. Image scale is 11 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute