Ethereal Ring

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark side of Saturn's largest moon and captures the halo-like ring produced by sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan's atmosphere.

A detached, high-altitude global haze layer encircles Titan. See Titan's Halo to learn more. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North on Titan is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 26, 2010 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 154 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute